Historical Novel About Nuremberg Trials Falls Short

“Crimes Against Humanity; such as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts against civilian populations.” This, along with criminal mistreatment of POWs, conspiracy to wage aggressive war and waging aggressive war, was the charge leveled at such key members of the Third Reich as Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Julius Streicher and Joachim von Ribbentrop at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. The sheer monstrosity of the crimes and the massiveness of the scale on which it was done were something unprecedented in history.

The decision of the victorious Allies (in particular, the U.S. and Britain) to hold Nazi war criminals accountable for their actions before an ad hoc tribunal engendered a certain amount of criticism. The Russians would have preferred to kill the culprits without a trial, as part of the military process of war. A trial might give the Nazis too much of a forum. It might also create a precedent, enabling victors of future wars to claim the right to condemn their defeated enemies as “criminals” for acts less heinous than genocide.

Yet, in the final analysis, the case for holding the Nuremberg Trials seems overwhelmingly clear: the magnitude of the crime cried out for some attempt, however inadequate, at punishment. Pursuing justice through an orderly legal process would affirm civilized values. And it would also affirm that there are higher, more universal, moral values.

In his latest novel, “Nuremberg: The Reckoning,” the erudite and engaging conservative pundit (or should one say icon?) William F. Buckley Jr. attempts to give us a fictional version of this momentous event. It is certainly quite a departure, in subject, style and tone, from his popular spy novels. But, alas, it does not add much to our understanding of its subject, nor does it really succeed on purely novelistic grounds.

The task Buckley has set himself is admittedly difficult, but not impossible, as demonstrated by Stanley Kramer’s gripping 1961 film “Judgment at Nuremberg.” But where Kramer wisely chose to dramatize a trial with fictional characters (albeit based on some of the later trials that actually took place at Nuremberg), Buckley mingles portraits of real-life personages (like defiantly unrepentant Goering and Supreme Court Justice-turned-prosecutor Robert Jackson) with fictional characters.

The central character is the fictional Sebastian Reinhard, a young German-American serviceman serving as a translator at the trials and preliminary questionings. Although Sebastian has some brief encounters with real-life figures, most of his dealings are with another fictional character: accused war criminal Kurt Waldemar Amadeus, who knows what happened to Sebastian’s father, Axel, who was forced to stay behind in Germany after his wife and son fled in 1939. Perhaps the biggest mistake on Buckley’s part, in terms of historical verisimilitude, was making the fictional Amadeus an actual defendant at this trial of two dozen notorious characters.

Buckley effectively intersperses Sebastian’s experiences at Nuremberg in 1945 with scenes from his family’s past. Indeed, the novel opens quite dramatically in Hamburg, 1939, with 13-year-old Sebastian and his parents secretly planning their departure for America. This part of the novel, dealing with Sebastian’s complicated family background and the father’s fate, is a good deal more inventive and absorbing than Buckley’s disappointingly lackluster version of the famous trial.

Virginia Woolf once said that she found the most difficult aspect of writing a novel was getting one’s characters from one place to another. This also seems to be a problem for Buckley here: too much attention to rote scene-shifting as Sebastian makes his way from Arizona to military training in Georgia to Nuremberg; not enough attention to character portrayal or the weighty issues of law, morality and the nature of humanity that come with the subject matter.

A dispiriting number of scenes are filled with filler like this account of Sebastian’s first glimpse of Landers, the chief warrant officer: “He lifted a bulky folder and leafed through mimeographed pages. He dialed again. ‘Sergeant, this is Chief Landers of Justice Jackson’s office. The Justice is looking for Major Gripsholm. He doesn’t answer his phone or his room number at the Grand. I wondered if he might be with Colonel Andrus?....Yes, well. Yes, I know Colonel Andrus doesn’t like to be interrupted, but you’ll have to get word to Major Gripsholm that the Chief Prosecutor--’ The bell rang again. ‘Hang-on-a-minute.’ The phone transfer was done .... ‘Yes sir? I think I’ve located him, Justice....’ ”

Even the very poignant and harrowing story of Axel Reinhard’s experiences in Nazi Germany is marred by this kind of filler. And the novel’s ending seems a serious miscalculation as to what readers will find climactic. It is built upon Amadeus’ last revelation--and request--to Sebastian. The analogy that the unrepentant Amadeus draws between two condemned men--Sebastian’s father, killed by the Nazis, and himself, facing execution--is clearly a false one, so that Sebastian’s last-ditch efforts to extend a small act of mercy toward this villain make for an ending that is more of whimper than a bang.