The time was 2.30 p.m. on Friday 22 March, the place the top floor of the Washington Hotel, Washington DC. Lined up on the platform in the glare of the television lights were nine elderly men, all into their seventies or beyond. Their names were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial and Subsequent Proceedings in 1945-9. Their audience was just as extraordinary: over a hundred men and women who had been lawyers, interpreters, translators, research analysts, secretaries, journalists and photographers at those trials, and who had come from all over the world to attend the 45th anniversary reunion of the International Military Tribunal. A gathering like this was never going to occur again, and the younger generation present trod softly in the presence of people who had cross-examined the men who for our century have been the definitive 'war criminals'.

LRB 25 April 1991 | PDF Download