Kim Christian Priemel. The Betrayal

Kim Christian Priemel’s The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence examines the conceptualization, organization, and course of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg of 1945–1946 and the twelve “successor” trials conducted by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT) from 1946 to 1949. “Betrayal” refers to the argument of the prosecution that the crimes of the Nazi regime were a result of Germany’s departure from the norms of Western and European civilization. Yet Priemel’s impressive close reading of the thousands of pages of trial transcripts makes clear that while the theories of Germany’s historical Sonderweg (special path) contributed to the prosecution’s interpretative framework, the trials themselves were conventional contests about fact, evidence, and the law. As in multiple previous accounts of the trials, the American chief prosecutor Robert Jackson and counsel for the prosecution Telford Taylor loom large. In addition, Priemel’s account offers extensive material on Jackson and Taylor’s British, French, and Soviet counterparts and a multitude of less well-known Allied lawyers, judges, and academic advisors, as well as on defendants and their remarkably unapologetic and experienced team of lawyers.

Betrayal · German · International law · Nazism · Nuremberg trials · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Successor cardinal · Tribunal · War crime · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies