The Nuremberg Women

NUREMBERG, 1945. The eyes of a world desperate for truth, hope and justice turn to a courtroom where the leaders of the defeated Nazi regime sit in the dock. In this revelatory history, Natalie Livingstone sheds new light on the trial of the century, through the stories of extraordinary women whose importance has long been ignored.

Anti-fascist journalist Erika Mann - daughter of Germany's most famous writer - came to Nuremberg seeking a reckoning with a Germany she had fled more than a decade before, while Hungarian countess Ingeborg Kálnoky found herself presiding over a guest house in which perpetrators and survivors of the Nazi's worst crimes lived side by side. Russian interpreter Tatiana Stupnikova would be forced to confront terrifying revelations about her country's recent history, and German writer Ursula von Kardorff, reporting on the trials for domestic audiences, found herself torn between the evidence of the courtroom and a selective memory of her work for the Third Reich. Although she was barred from speaking in court on account of her gender, American lawyer Harriet Zetterberg assembled some of the most important prosecution cases, while British painter Laura Knight produced the most famous image of the courtroom. Rebecca West, the celebrated writer, arrived feeling lost and depleted and hoped the proceedings at Nuremberg might somehow shock her back to life. And Auschwitz survivor and French Resistance fighter Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier's defiant, devastating testimony laid the foundations for the world's awareness of the Holocaust.

Seen through the eyes of these astonishing women, the story of Nuremberg is a monumental human drama full of hope and romance, terror and conflict. It is the story of a search for truth among misinformation, love among ruins and light in overwhelming darkness. Eighty years after the trials, The Nuremberg Women offers a gripping new account of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.