It is a powerful painting, yet something is missing. Contemporary estimates suggest that the Nuremberg trials involved 300 female lawyers, linguists and journalists, yet women are nowhere to be seen in Knight’s monumental work. “A man’s world,” the British journalist Rebecca West concluded dolefully in one of her two reports from Court 600 for The New Yorker. West is one of just eight women whose Nuremberg lives Natalie Livingstone explores in this revelatory book, which sets out to offer a female lens to one of the great moments of historical reckoning in living memory.
Knight chose not to paint the whole of the courtroom, instead filling the background of her canvas with scenes of wartime devastation. This explains why she didn’t have room for the “fish tank”, the glass cubicle from where teams of interpreters worked feverishly to feed four languages into the headphones worn by virtually everyone in court.
Among these silver-tongued linguists was Tatiana Stupnikova, a 22-year-old Red Army veteran who was terrified that any mistake she made while translating the words of the German-speaking defendants into Russian would result in being accused of sabotage by her communist bosses. This wasn’t paranoia: one of the Soviet prosecutors had already been mysteriously shot in his bedroom — many suspected it was for displeasing the high-ups in Moscow.
Knight also didn’t show the witness box in her picture, otherwise she might have included Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a French Resistance worker who had survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück and whose testimony on January 28, 1946, was the first time that the full depravity of the concentration camps had been set before the world. With total composure, Vaillant-Couturier told the court that babies in Auschwitz were tattooed on their legs, since there wasn’t room for five digits on their tiny arms. They were the lucky ones. Most newborns were drowned at birth.
Livingstone starts her book, though, with Harriet Zetterberg, a fiercely clever American who had made the unlikely leap from high school teacher to Yale Law School graduate. Harriet had been summoned to Nuremberg to help the prosecution to build a case against Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer, whose reign of terror had earned him the nickname “the Butcher of Poland”. Frank had foolishly forgotten to destroy his diary, so Zetterberg trawled through it looking for proof that he had been a willing instigator of multiple atrocities rather than merely following orders. “You might say,” she reported wryly in a letter home to her mother, that he “dug his own grave with his own fountain pen.”
And yet it was not Zetterberg but Lieutenant Colonel William Baldwin who stood up to present the case against Frank. She was reduced to sitting beside her boss and handing him pages of the brief that she had so brilliantly compiled. Zetterberg, though, had been hiding a secret: she was already married to another member of the American legal team. To avoid being sent home (there were rules against anyone bringing their spouse to the proceedings) she had kept her maiden name while continuing to live with Daniel Margolies in their joint accommodation. Living in sin was more acceptable at Nuremberg than living together as husband and wife.
Nonetheless, when Zetterberg’s pregnancy started to show in early 1946 her contract was immediately terminated. Finding it impossible to get professional work in postwar America, the brilliant lawyer was reduced to following her husband around the world as his career went from strength to strength. Zetterberg’s story, Livingstone says ruefully, is one of “thwarted ambition and stolen promise”.
Ingeborg Kalnoky came from a very different background. Born into the Prussian aristocracy, she had become a countess on her marriage to the Hungarian Hugo Kalnoky in 1934. Having endured a tricky war, dodging both the German and Russian armies, the multilingual Kalnoky ended up in 1946 without her husband on the outskirts of Nuremberg running a “witness house”. It was her job to play hostess to men and women of all nationalities as they waited to be called to give testimony at the Palace of Justice.
It soon became apparent that many of Kalnoky’s guests were lucky not to be sitting in the criminal dock. There was Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, who liked to boast that he knew all about the Führer’s sex life. Then there was Wilhelm Scheidt, who had been an officer in the German army before joining the plot to assassinate Hitler. Transfixed by Kalnoky’s film-star good looks, the lonely Scheidt took to following her round the guest house, periodically confessing his undying love. It was an American officer, though, who lured Kalnoky to his office, locked the door and then attempted to rape her. It is a reminder, Livingstone says, that sexual violence towards women didn’t cease in postwar Europe simply because the men had decided to stop fighting.
Tensions inevitably ran high at the witness house, especially when five concentration camp survivors arrived in July 1946. Until now everyone had eaten together, but Kalnoky introduced two medium-sized tables into the dining room to keep the newcomers separate from the Nazis. Even so, tensions continued to simmer: among her guests Kalnoky counted one heart attack, several suicide attempts and a great many brooding silences.
One of Livingstone’s great strengths is the way she doesn’t duck her subjects’ moral complexity. Kalnoky, for instance, remained sentimental about her Nazi guests, even falling a bit in love with Rudolf Diels, who had briefly led the Gestapo in the early 1930s. In her schmaltzy memoirs, published in the 1970s, she speaks of Diels as a romantic hero with eyes “mingling plea and pleasure, their gaze on me was like a touch”.
Similarly, Ursula von Kardorff, one of 15 German journalists accredited to report from Court 600, had always struggled with the full horror of the evidence unfolding about the concentration camps, Auschwitz in particular. “Is one bound to believe such a ghastly story? It simply cannot be true!” At one point von Kardorff’s articles were considered so soft towards the Nazis that she was temporarily excluded from the court.
And then there is Knight, who at 68 was a dame of the British Empire. She was delighted to be staying at the city’s luxurious Grand hotel with other VIPs. It was thrilling to think that she might be sleeping in the actual bed that the Führer had used during the prewar Nuremberg rallies (she almost certainly wasn’t).
It is in this atmosphere of moral cloudiness that Zetterberg emerges as one of the heroines of this revelatory book. The American lawyer believed passionately that a meticulous court case, with witnesses, defence counsel, simultaneous translation and even some acquittals, was essential for establishing the rule of international law as the basis for enduring peace. Such a scrupulous attitude struck many as preposterous, including Winston Churchill, who maintained that the Nazi leaders should have been shot on capture since their wickedness was “beyond the scope of judicial process”. Eighty years on, and with our faith in international order challenged by the day, how vital it feels to be reminded of the principles laid down at Nuremberg, and the women who contributed to that crucial process.
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