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NUREMBURG THE RECKONING is neither pure fact nor pure fiction, but a combination of the two, faction. At the center of the fiction part is a recent German immigrant to the U.S., Sebastian Reinhardt, who becomes a lieutenant in the American Army and is sent to Nuremburg to assist one of the prosecutors in the trial of the highest Nazi leaders still alive. Though 1945 is the focus of the book, it jumps back and forth to cover incidents in the lives of Reinhardt's parents and grandparents. Another leading fictitious character is SS Brigadier General Kurt Amadeus, a defendant in the Nuremburg trials who had been in charge of a death camp and had gassed and cremated a quarter of a million people, mostly Jews, but also some POWS and criminals. Lt. Reinhardt, who of course speaks fluent German, is assigned to that part of the prosecution team that is preparing the case again Amadeus. As the German-speaker, Reinhardt is thus the member of the prosecution team who has the most contact with Amadeus. In the beginning we get much of Reinhardt's personal history, which although fictional, is given far more telling by the author than the customary fictional showing. The reader knows early on that Reinhardt is one-quarter Jewish, but Reinhardt himself learns it only later. As for his father who stayed in Germany, Reinhardt learns that he died as a German officer a few years before the end of the war, but nothing more. His maternal grandmother had married a German-Jewish orchestra conductor who died soon after, and when she remarried it appeared that her second husband was her daughter's father, contrary to fact. This daughter married Reinhardt's father and they all returned to Germany. The mother and son go back to the U.S. at the beginning of World War Two, but the father is forced to remain behind. Later it turns out that Reinhardt's father had his last position under General Amadeus, thus completing a circle. The factual story is the famous Nuremburg trial itself, which is the real power justifying the whole book. Never before in history had so many top leaders of a defeated nation been called upon to defend their acts of aggressive warfare and crimes against humanity. Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were already dead, but Goering and some twenty-plus Nazi leaders were on trial for their lives. Although these facts could no doubt be made into an enthralling story, the individual lives of all those involved would have made more an encyclopaedia than a single volume. Thus the author concentrates on a composite fictional career of one man, General Amadeus, to give the essence of the whole. We get only a whiff of the grotesquely inhuman thinking and actions of the Nazis, but it is enough to permeate the entire book. I did not find the personal story of Sebastian Reinhardt intriguing, neither his love life nor his reaction on learning the true story of his father. It was the Nuremburg trial itself, presided over by four real-life judges from the U.S., England, France, and the Soviet Union, with proportional national representation in the prosecutor staffs, that made the story fascinating. (As a personal note, much later I worked as a law clerk for one of the senior real-life prosecutors at Nuremburg, Charles Horsky, a partner in Dean Acheson's law firm.) The behind-the-scenes interplay and disagreements of some of these staffs, their relationship with the defendants, the attempts to keep the trials on a purely judicial basis instead of one of pure revenge, and the efforts of the defendants to seize upon every weakness in the prosecution efforts form the guts of the story. Although there is a certain amount of suspense in the fictional account, an effort to keep the reader both interested and guessing, the fiction writing is rightly subordinate to the non-fiction. Hence it is not overly surprising that we get sentences such as: "It had to be more than an autarchic recital of its self-constituted authority." And phrases such as "encephalophonic whir of the camera" and "evolutionarily defensible uses of war-making," expressions that probably would not have been used in pure fiction. Nonetheless, I still would have preferred more concentration on the real-life trials themselves, but of course that would have taken the book almost entirely out of the realm of fiction. As an easy-to-read introduction (in spite of a few encephalophonic, or more correctly in this case encephalophanic, words) to a most important aspect of our near recent history, a history that is sadly much neglected today, it is a welcome book, well worth reading. Buckley gives an accurate impression of how the trial proceeded and what it's significance is. The reader should also be aware that perhaps I have not given the fictional aspect as much respect as it may deserve, for the big national reviewers seem unanimous in giving the book as a whole high praise. In any event, I recommend it as highly useful, as well as highly interesting, reading.
Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, June 2003
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