Nuremberg is back but what have we learnt?
The ‘carpenter of war crimes tribunals’. A novel set in The Hague court. And just how ordinary were the Nazis?
Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring in Nuremberg, the 2025 film
This Week Those Books is chock-full of crucial context — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.
Go to this link for a quick read
The Big Story:
Exactly 80 years after the Nuremberg trials began, that unprecedented legal effort to punish Nazi leaders is on cinema screens amid fading hopes of real-life prosecutions for recent and ongoing crimes against humanity.
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Nuremberg, the new film starring Russell Crowe, is a reminder of how those famous trials have not resulted in a fair system of international justice.
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The International Criminal Court (ICC) – the permanent and direct heir to the principles enshrined in the Nuremberg trials – has taken up 33 cases thus far, in which the accused are nationals from the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Libya, Mali and Uganda.
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Illegal invasions – Ukraine in 2022, Iraq in 2003 – and more than 70,000 dead in Gaza have not triggered ICC trials so far.
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After Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, the US State Department appears to have closed the office that helped investigate crimes against humanity.
In our first book, the United States’s first Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues notes:
The futile slogan of “never again” after World War II collapsed under the weight of atrocity crimes occurring again and again…[but] international justice has as much to do with the vagaries of global politics and our own moral strength as it does with treaties, courtrooms, prosecutors, judges, and defendants.
This Week’s Books:
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The account of a man who built on Nuremberg’s legacy.
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A novel about interpreting for a leader on trial.
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And a book that inspired a movie.
