Michael Arditti

The tedium of covering ‘the greatest trial in history’

The reporters who descended on Nuremberg in October 1945 included some of the century’s greatest writers. But the protracted proceedings would test their patience – and integrity

Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess in the spotlight at the Nuremberg trials on 4 December 1945. [Getty Images] 
issue 14 September 2024

Three-and-a-half miles south-west of Nuremberg in the small town of Stein stands the Schloss Faber-Castell, a 19th-century neo-Renaissance castle built for a dynasty of pencil manufacturers. In October 1945 it became home to hundreds of reporters who were covering the trial of 21 high-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Göring, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher and Albert Speer, with Martin Bormann being tried in absentia.

Prominent among the reporters were internationally celebrated writers such as John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Elsa Triolet, Erika Mann and Erich Kästner, as well as the future German chancellor Willy Brandt, who returned from a 12-year exile in Norway as a correspondent for Oslo’s daily newspaper, Arbeiderbladet. As Uwe Neumahr remarks in the foreword to this fascinating account of the ‘press camp’: ‘Never before and never since had so many famous writers from all over the world come together as during this “zero hour”.

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