Fans pick 100 books like The Nuremberg Legacy

In this remarkable combination of memoir and scholarly work, Philippe Sands, a British lawyer actively engaged in support of human rights, combines the story of his own Eastern European Jewish family with those of two jurists who forged the legal framework for the Nuremberg trials: Hersch Lauterpacht, who developed the concept of “crimes against humanity,” and Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term “genocide” to describe what was taking place. Both men and Sands’s maternal grandfather hailed from Lwów, part of southern Poland before the war, and now Lviv, in Ukraine. 

All had relatives murdered in the Holocaust. They were determined to prosecute those responsible and establish an international framework for the protection of human rights and played an important part in the trials at Nuremberg. 

Kochavi’s book gave me a more complete and nuanced understanding of how the Nuremberg war crimes court came to be, how defendants were selected, and what law to apply. Based on copious research, Kochavi uncovers the inside story of how the Allies ultimately agreed to establish an international court to hold Nazi officials accountable for mass atrocities instead of summarily executing them, which Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin favored. Initial U.S. and British resistance to including crimes against German nationals (extermination of the Jews among them) was overcome by strong public, especially Jewish, opposition.

An easily accessible overview of development and internal workings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) up to the first stages of the Milosevic trial. Hagan satisfied my interest in what happens behind the scenes: the struggles, losses, and triumphs of creating the first international war crimes court since Nuremberg and Tokyo. I found particularly illuminating his discussion of how an ICTY prosecution team developed the legal theory, supported by substantial evidence, of rape as an intentional strategy to further the goal of ethnic cleansing, for the first time making it a war crime in its own right. His explication of the tension between diplomacy (which often utilizes amnesty in seeking an end to conflict) and accountability (which seeks justice for victims and humanity) was thought-provoking.

I’m drawn to inconvenient truths and Canadian Erna Paris reveals them in exceptionally readable prose. Paris discusses why it took more than fifty years to establish a permanent International Criminal Court to try war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. She examines the reasons for U.S. opposition to the permanent International Criminal Court established in 2002, identifies U.S. officials who worked to undermine efforts to develop the ICC, exposes the real reasons they did so, and debunks the official position of protecting US soldiers.

The trials of Nazi war criminals are an important but subsidiary theme in Mary Fulbrook’s book. In Francine Hirsch’s study, the most significant trial of top-ranking German officials takes center stage, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Unlike most previous analyses of Nuremberg, which depict the Soviets as minor actors who, if anything, were impediments to the quest for justice, Hirsch insists that Soviet contributions were essential cornerstones of the trial’s success. This may seem an unlikely role for a totalitarian country already responsible for terror famines in Ukraine, the atrocious show trials of the 1930s, and the senseless murder of 20,000 Poles in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Nonetheless, as Hirsch cogently argues, without Soviet participation the trial may never have occurred. The glory of her book is its insistence on the counterintuitive and contradictory nature of reality, in which, against all expectations, an authoritarian regime led by a… show more.

I don’t think I really understood the relationship between religious faith, constructions of race, and the law before reading this book.

Darian-Smith walks the reader through several essential cases from the 16th to the 21st centuries, all grounded in thorough analysis and accessible prose. Reading her chapter on the Dawes Act and the way the law was weaponized against Native communities in the U.S. knocked me on my heels, while her final chapters on the Nuremberg war trials and the challenges of neoliberalism in an age of globalization redefined my understanding of our modern world.

With illustrations throughout and an ability to paint a clear picture of the topic, this is a book I return to regularly.

Albert Speer is one of the most enigmatic figures within the Nazi leadership. I have always been intrigued by the fact that most biographies of him – including Gitta Sereny’s famous Speer: His Battle with Truth – have been fairly benign in their judgment of Speer’s character and deeds. Although directly responsible for the slave labour programme in the later stages of the war and a member of Hitler’s inner circle until the end in 1945, Hitler’s favourite architect managed to get away with a comparatively light sentence at the Nuremberg Trials, where he admitted partial responsibility. Handsome and well-spoken, Speer was often publicly perceived as one of the “less bad” Nazis. Martin Kitchen’s biography revises that image and convincingly shows the reader how intimately involved Speer was in many of the crimes of the Nazis.

Slobodan Milosevic’s trial by the first post-Cold War international court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, required the creation of a whole new court and set of procedures, and established many of the current rules on trying war crimes and crimes against humanity. There’s a lot written on the ICTY, but I like Scharf’s book because he tells the backstories, explains the different choices that the court could have made, and makes for a fascinating read.

Every book list needs a good wild card, wouldn’t you agree?

This Dark Horse one-shot published in the run-up to the premiere for Amazon’s Hunters is only a few pages long, but perfectly encapsulates the pulpy spirit of the revenge-driven series created by David Weil. Mr. Weil has stated on numerous occasions that the small screen project was a way for him to pay homage to his Holocaust survivor grandmother and tell an epic, comic book-inspired story of good vs. evil.

The one-shot does just that as the titular squad of Nazi eliminators tracks down a concentration camp doctor notorious for conducting unspeakable human experiments and collecting gruesome trophies.

While Eric is not a Queen, I think he is a Prince. 

Trains. Many trains. Rail travel has always been a crucial element in crime fiction–which works for me since I truly adore train journeys, real or imagined. Seriously though, there’s so much I love about Eric Ambler’s book.

Known as the creator of the modern thriller (just as Braddon created the murder mystery), Ambler – like all the authors I’ve chosen – offers a whole lot more than thrills. I’ve mentioned the trains, but I love the way in which his heroes are just ordinary guys who discover they can do extraordinary things while defeating Fascism.

I’m fascinated by Ambler’s unobtrusive but telling insights into some of the darkest moments in European history – this is writing that takes a popular genre and turns it into literary gold.