Nuremberg: The Reckoning, by William F. Buckley, Jr. Harcourt. 364 pages. $25.
Having dealt with Yale and God and Man by age 26, William F. Buckley Jr. has no qualms, four decades and 41 books later, tackling Nuremberg. Meticulously researched, his historical novel, Nuremberg: The Reckoning, is quintessential Buckley: provocative, fast moving, sharply focused on unwelcome moral questions, erudite even when it tries not to be. (Only a Buckley protagonist would go to a sleazy strip joint, but then end up alone at the bar, contemplating the distinction between malum in se and malum prohibitum).
Humanizing his ponderous subject, Buckley creates a fictional German-American family, the Reinhards. The story opens in 1939, as the Reinhard family prepares to leave for America, where they secretly intend to stay until the war ends. But hours before departure, the Gestapo forces Alex Reinhard, an accomplished architect, to remain in Germany. Unknowingly, his wife and young son sail without him.
Except for sparse notes, little more is heard from Alex Reinhard until 1943, when the family learns of his mysterious death, still in Germany. By then, son Sebastian Reinhard is a teen-ager in Arizona. He ultimately returns to Germany as an American Army officer and Nuremberg translator. In that role, Sebastian becomes the chief interrogator, and eventual confidant, of General Kurt Amadeus, a doomed Nazi death camp commandant who knows the details of Alex Reinhard's work for the Nazis - and his death.
Contrived? Certainly.
But brilliantly so. From the first whiff of suspicion about what sort of buildings the Nazis might have forced Sebastian's architect-father to design, the reader is drawn inexorably into the whole awful caldron of Nazi horrors, everything leading back to the central unanswerable question: How could so many ordinary and presumably decent Germans have taken part in Hitler's vast Holocaust enterprise?
At the same time, Buckley explores another, much-less-examined issue: With Stalin's bloodthirsty crimes against humanity exceeding even Hitler's, how could the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, with Stalin-appointed judges, have had any moral force at all?
Meandering at first, Buckley's story builds steadily, enriched by colorful cameos of Nuremberg's historical figures. And when Sebastian Reinhard is not interrogating Nazis, he reads John Maynard Keynes and Walter Lippmann, listens to jazzmen Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, catches feature films by Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, immersing the reader in the popular culture of 1945. The final chapters crackle with twists and surprises, and the conclusion is compelling.
Over the years, "Nuremberg trial" has become accepted shorthand for ultimate, inevitable, righteous justice. Buckley demurs. In contrast, his Nuremberg depicts an ex post facto judicial process, based on the criminalization of acts after they were committed.
Guilt by association was readily accepted, challenges to the Tribunal's powers and rulings were not permitted, the hideous double standard of Stalin's participation was simply ignored and verdicts were largely preordained.
It may have been the best possible process at the time. But with a new International Criminal Court now in formation, the questions Buckley raises in this ambitious fiction are far from hypothetical. For that reason, Nuremberg succeeds on two levels. It offers a fresh perspective on what happened over a half-century ago, and presages what might happen again.
David W. Marston is author of Malice Aforethought, an analysis of abuses in law practice, and co-author of Inside Hoover's FBI, with Neil J. Welch. U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 1976 to 1978, Marston is now a lawyer in civil practice in Philadelphia.