This is far more than a “personal memoir”: Taylor, who has since taught law and written extensively on 20th-century history, draws on stacks of documents and 60-odd books. Close-up views of the defendants come from prison psychologist G. M. Gilbert, courtroom scenes from New Yorker writer Rebecca West. Author Ben Swearingen is Taylor’s expert on how Hermann Goring, the Allies’ biggest catch, might have hidden the poison capsule with which he cheated the hangman. (Best guess: he was helped by a now dead American officer.) Even Taylor’s memories of the ad hoc community of trial participants and the behind-the-scenes deliberations are richly supplemented by others’ observations.
The judges, Taylor writes, squabbled over their decisions: the Soviet judge voting to hang them all, the French judge surprisingly “softhearted.” Taylor thinks anti-Semitic propagandist Julius Streicher shouldn’t have been hanged-vile as he was, Taylor doesn’t see him as a major war criminal-and that Rudolf Hess was crazy enough for his life sentence to be commuted. (In 1987, still in prison, he killed himself at 93.) Taylor’s gravest reservations are about the unavoidable Soviet presence, and the issue of whose war crimes got tried. “Considering the times and circumstances,” he writes, “it is hardly surprising that the Tribunal was given jurisdiction over the vanquished but not the victors.” But Taylor has long maintained that “victors’ justice” is unjust; his exhaustive account leaves us with a sense of justice done-and some moral loose ends.
