Nuremberg Trials

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Allied powers established the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to prosecute major surviving leaders of the regime. The trial began in November 1945 and heard extensive evidence concerning aggressive war, occupation, persecution and mass murder.

Defendants were held in Nuremberg prison while lawyers, guards, interpreters, doctors and psychiatrists worked around them. Psychological interviews with senior prisoners became a distinctive part of the surviving record and raised wider questions about ideology, responsibility and the apparent normality of men involved in extraordinary crimes.

Helen Fry’s Nuremberg: The Translator’s Tale tells this history through Howard Triest, a German-Jewish refugee who returned as a US Army interpreter and worked with psychiatrists examining the prisoners. His parents had been murdered at Auschwitz.