THE NUREMBERG WOMEN: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice...chilling, informative stories

THE NUREMBERG WOMEN: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice
NATALIE LIVINGSTONE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The most famous trial of the twentieth century—told through the eyes of the women history forgot.

In November 1945, the world turned its gaze to Nuremberg. Inside a courtroom built by and for men, justice was being sought for crimes almost beyond comprehension. The spotlight fell on Nazi leaders, Allied prosecutors and military judges—but in the shadows, women were recording, interpreting, witnessing, painting, testifying. Yet their names were often missing from the headlines. Eighty years on, this book finally returns them to the centre of the story.

The Nuremberg Women follows eight extraordinary a young Soviet interpreter balancing political survival with truth-telling; a British painter capturing justice in oils; a French resistance fighter who survived Auschwitz to confront her persecutors; a Hungarian countess hosting both Nazis and survivors in a single house. Alongside them stand the sharpest literary minds of the day—Erika Mann, Rebecca West and others—each wielding the pen as a tool of reckoning.

Far from the official narrative, Natalie Livingstone reveals a trial that was more intimate, chaotic and human than history has allowed. It was a place of intense love affairs and political tensions, of personal reckonings and the first tremors of the Cold War. These women, often dismissed or sidelined, shaped how the trial unfolded—and how it was remembered.

This is Nuremberg as you've never seen not only a reckoning with the horrors of war, but a story of erasure, courage and transformation. The women's voices—once silenced—now ring out with clarity, offering a powerful new vision of the past, and of justice itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The story of Erika Mann, the reporter and daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, was excerpted by LitHub this week. I link it here because it is a big ask to recommend a book about the Nuremberg Trials to y'all when the US readership is most likely in a celebratory mood. Erika Mann's story in this book is my lure to get you to see the

The stories of these women, eight of them, were not foregrounded at the time they were living them...kind of understandable, given what was happening in 1945 and 1946...but I'd only ever heard of two of them before, and we've had eighty years of endlessly rehashing their subjects' atrocities to be told this information about any of them. Rebecca West and Erika Mann are known to some to this day for their writing. Erika Mann, a lesbian and Red Scare victim, is much more well known in queer circles than among the cishet. Rebecca Weat, if you're reading this blog, needs no introduction. Her role in the reporting and the crafting of public opinion around the Nuremberg Trials is considerably less known or discussed at the least, even among people who fancy her writing.

The psychic toll on many of these selected women is well-represented by their fiendishly tough jobs...translating the defendants' words describing their crimes, catering to the mens' practical needs, the many and various ways they were required to treat monstrous people as ordinary when each had suffered to a greater or lesser degree from the evils they committed...it is impressive none of these women turned murderous vengeance-seeker. What is true of the defendants, that they were anti-semitic to the bone, was sadly true of most of the non-Jewish women in this story. While the main focus was on the Nazi bigwigs, there were witnesses to house and feed during the trials and they evoked different responses from these profiled women. Not all victims of crimes are saints and not a few are repulsive as people victims or no.

I enjoyed the reasonable tone Author Livingstone uses throughout the book. Where I would succumb to the inner prompting to say horrible things about the nastier cases, presenting their messy intimate lives with eagerly condemnatory insults, she is simply reporting (in more detail than I myownself wanted) the factual reality of the people unjustly ignored by history. "Warts and all" is more than just a nostrum peddled by biographers and memoirists to excuse spilling the tea on the dead. It reminds us that those who commit evil are, au fond, simply people; not good ones, but people; and so are the victims of evil.

It is important to make this information relatable, accessible to those of us living in a deeply polarized, deeply contentious world. Our comparatively recent past has great evildoers in it who worried about how their children were faring at the mercy of those who hate their parents. There were victims who hated other victims for their religion, and found sympathy for the perpetrators of crimes against those people, but not themselves of course.

Humans are complex beings with admixtures of admirable and awful traits. It will behoove all of us around the world to learn how our parents, grandparents faced the challenge of meting out justice even when they wanted revenge, and how many of those harmed were, by many people's lights, unworthhy of receiving justice because of their own turpitude.

It's also a thumping good read with lots of involving tales to tell.