The Writers’ Castle review: ‘gripping portrait of the reporters at Nuremberg’

John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner and William Shirer were some of the grand byliners, while among the then-unknowns were future German chancellor Willy Brandt as correspondent for various Norwegian newspapers (he had been in exile in Norway) and Markus Wolf, who would become the notorious chief of the East German foreign intelligence service.

The writers’ castle of the title of Uwe Neumahr’s idiosyncratic account of Nuremberg was Schloss Faber-Castell, built by the pencil-manufacturing dynasty in Stein, a nearby town, which was requisitioned as accommodation for the world’s press.

The media folk were crammed into the castle, some of them sleeping ten to a room. The grander the journalist, the less they liked it: Shirer, used to being put up in five-star hotels, complained bitterly about the conditions. Correspondents who had endured tough times during the war found it relatively comfortable and particularly enjoyed the excellent food (provided by the Americans) and the evening drinking and dancing sessions. But some journalists swiftly bored of the trials. West’s solution was to embark on an affair with the main American judge, Francis Biddle.

Neumahr, a German author and literary agent (an unusual combination), soon loses interest in Schloss Faber-Castell in favour of a study of the writers who found themselves in Nuremberg, some lesser known than the stars and many of them Jewish or from a Jewish background.

Erika Mann, daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann, was considered Jewish by the Nazis because of her mother Katja. A colourful figure, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 because of her performances as an anti-Nazi cabaret artist before pitching up in Nuremberg, via Switzerland and the US, as a war correspondent, billeted in the castle with her American lover, Betty Knox. Her abiding hatred of her German compatriots affected her writing on the trial.

The French Jewish writer Elsa Triolet wrote many misleading and downright false reports to support her belief that the Anglo-American judges and lawyers were pro-Nazi, a viewpoint that must have surprised the defendants when most of them were sentenced to death and swiftly executed.

One of the most interesting characters Neumahr portrays wasn’t even a journalist. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who came from a rabbinical background, was a courtroom interpreter who trained as an artist and went on to become one of Germany’s most distinguished writers. He interpreted for Otto Ohlendorf, commander of the mobile killing unit Einsatzgruppe D who admitted in court to having ordered the killing of 90,000 people on the Eastern front. Before his execution in 1951, he thanked his interpreters, including Hildesheimer, for their fairness in translating his words.

The Nuremberg trials were criticised for having few Jewish witnesses: three out of a total of 139. Only one Holocaust survivor was on the press benches: Ernst Michel, a former Auschwitz inmate whose parents were murdered there. When Göring heard of his presence, he asked to meet him. In his cell, Hitler’s henchman reached out to shake hands.

Confronted with the scoop of a lifetime, Michel froze, then made for the door.

“I couldn’t remain, I had to get away,” he later wrote, as telling a commentary on Nuremberg as any of the millions of words filed on the trials.