Using documents from German sources…Final Judgment: The Story of Nuremberg is a revealing X-ray of the whole political, economic, and moral system that the Nazis built up. It uses the Nuremberg trials as its starting point. But it peels away, one after another, the layers of meaning behind Nuremberg.
Anyone who followed the reports of the trials in the American press must have been dismayed by their fragmentary and superficial character. All we got were bits and pieces of the Nazi story. Millions of words were, of course, cabled from Nuremberg by correspondents to the twelve corners of the world—especially in the first few days. But mainly they were color stuff, portraying the trial as a spectacle. There were pictures of the defendants and detailed accounts of their behavior in jail. There were excerpts from United States Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson’s opening indictment, and some scattered debate on the international law at the basis of the trial. And at the end there was a sensational flare-up of think-pieces about how Goering managed to cheat the gallows by concealing his lethal poison. It is some kind of commentary on our press and our ways of thought that the most important trial of our era should have ended on the cheap note of a mystery thriller entitled The Case of the Hidden Poison. Nuremberg is still the Trial Nobody Knows.
In contrast with this surface stuff, Victor Bernstein has written an attack-in-depth on what the Nazis did, and the techniques they used, and what Nazism did to them. The book is a scalpel-dissection of the whole Nazi disease of which the Nuremberg criminals were only the more ulcerous outcroppings.-Print ed.
