The untold tale of the Nuremberg women

The Nuremberg Women tells the story of eight extraordinary women – some well known, others not at all – who helped determine the course of the 1946 trial in indelible ways. There is the journalist Erika Mann, the anti-fascist and symbolically important daughter of the great humanist German author Thomas, who reported on the trial for the London Evening Standard and who, as a cabaret performer, was also an entertaining presence at Faber-Castell, the lively castle where the international press corps were housed. There’s Rebecca West, whose luminous writings on Nuremberg reinvigorated public interest in what had become an arduous legal proceeding, and which are now largely forgotten.

And there is the brilliant American lawyer Harriet Zetterberg, who wrote the file that proved that Hans Frank, the “butcher of Poland” and that country’s governor general under Nazi occupation, was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens, many of them Jews. Alas, as a woman she wasn’t allowed to present the case in person and is remembered now only as a footnote in the memoir of the American lead counsel, Telford Taylor, who presented it instead.

“Nuremberg was the first time a foreign regime was held to account by an international court. And it was set up very hastily, and so women such as Zetterberg were thrust into these positions of great responsibility,” says Livingstone. “But Zetterberg was also married and when she became pregnant, she was forced to go back to have the baby in America, where her career dwindled. There was no infrastructure in America at that time for an ambitious working mother.” Indeed: in September 1946, Zetterberg gave birth to her daughter at the same time the judges in Nuremberg were deliberating the fates of the defendants (they delivered their verdicts at the end of the month, sentencing 11 of the 21 men in the dock to death by hanging including Frank; Göring died by cyanide the night before his execution). She rarely worked again.

One of the great strengths of The Women of Nuremberg is the diversity of viewpoints it presents. Also featured is the German journalist Ursula von Kardorff, who had stayed in Germany throughout the period of Nazi rule, writing among others for pro-Nazi newspapers.

She arrived in Nuremberg to report upon proceedings “from the eyes of a woman”. But she was also writing from a position of defeat rather than victory, and from a despairing sense of patriotism rather than contempt. Livingstone presents a complex, agonised woman whose barely digested feelings of complicity, denial and bewilderment foreshadowed Germany’s complex psychological journey in the decades following the war. “She writes in her diary, ‘Nowhere is it more painful to be German as it is in Nuremberg,’’’ says Livingstone. “She constantly felt the need to apologise for who she was.”

Then there is Laura Knight, at the time one of the most famous female artists in England yet who cuts a morally ambiguous figure, arguably more fascinated by Nazi power than she was its unspeakable barbarity. “Knight was a very complicated character for me to understand,” says Livingstone. “In order for her to produce the painting that she did she had to regard Nuremberg as almost a piece of theatre. But I also think on one level she was dazzled by the pomp and ceremony that greeted her at Nuremberg. She was put up at the Grand Hotel, which is where all the dignitaries stayed, and mistakenly thought it was the same hotel room that Hitler would stay in when he was in Nuremberg for the rallies. She even thought she was staying in his room and in the diaries writes about putting her head on a ‘down pillow’ and ‘sleeping soundly’ in Hitler’s bed. So there are aspects of her that are hard to reconcile.”

Yet the most important voice of all is that of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier. A former photojournalist, she joined the French Resistance during the war and was imprisoned at Auschwitz as a political prisoner. She was one of the first witnesses to appear at Nuremberg (the court had previously largely relied on written witness testimonies) and her account of what she had experienced opened the eyes of the world to the unimaginable depravity of the concentration camps.

“For me, Marie-Claude is the heart and soul of the book,” says Livingstone. “She was a fearless fighter who wasn’t Jewish, but who risked her life to fight Nazism. She spent two years in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück but miraculously survived, and what perhaps drove her to do so was that she wanted to turn the people who’d been reduced to numbers back into names. She was only in Nuremberg for 24 hours, yet her impact on the trial is indelible. She changed the entire course of the trial and with it the course of history.”

Indeed, Vaillant-Couturier was the first witness to provide the court with details of the horrors of the gas chambers, of the squads that removed the gold dentures from the bodies, of the corpses burning in pits. As also the first female witness to speak, she told too of the specific violence meted out against women. During her two-hour testimony she took care to name every person she knew who had died at the hands of the Nazis. And, as she left the courtroom, in a moment that stills the soul even now, she deliberately walked along the front of the dock in silence and looked each of the indicted Nazis in the eye. “I wanted them to see me,” she later told journalists. “And [to see] that it was through my eyes that millions of victims, men women and children who saw them and judged them.”

From the vantage point of today, ravaged by political polarisation and seemingly intractable conflict, Nuremberg looks like a halcyon moment in international cooperation – a brief period in post-war history where international powers were united through a shared moral ideology and a faith in justice and due process. “Nuremberg was very much an ambition that wars could be prevented,” says Livingstone. “You can see today how fragile that backbone is and how easy it is to run roughshod over it. But we can also see Nuremberg as a story of hope, and a story of light amid overwhelming darkness.” And a story in which women played an essential part.

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​The Nuremberg Women is published by John Murray

Natalie Livingstone is in conversation with Simon Sebag Montefiore​​ on Ap​ril ​23. To book: go​.thejc.com/tnwa