Susanne Karstedt Brave the mediocre Fritzsche [one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials against the major war criminals] who tried to put down how happenings looked to people who had never quite known what was happening; and brave the men, who in making the Nuremberg trial, tried to force a huge and sprawling historical event to become comprehensible. It is only by making such efforts that we survive. With these words, Rebecca West concludes her account of the Nuremberg trials, which she had covered as a journalist from beginning to end. An astute observer inside and outside of the courtroom, of defendants and judges, as well as of ordinary Germans living in and around Nuremberg at the time, she recorded the misinformation and misunderstandings among all affected, and her concluding remarks sum these observations up. She writes them as she reviews a book by Hans Fritzsche, who stood on...