The first Nuremberg Trial has been exhaustively documented for both experts and the general reader ever since the final verdict was announced for the twenty-four defendants in October 1946. However, the experience of the press corps has been largely overlooked. Uwe Neumahr addresses this absence in the literature. The result is a skillfully crafted collective biography of the reporters who covered the trials. He begins the work with an overview of the press camp, housed in the confiscated castle of the Faber-Castell family located in Stein, a few kilometers from the courthouse. After a consideration of the family and its Nazi connections, Neumahr devotes chapters to thirteen exemplary authors including William Shirer, Erich Kästner, Janet Flanner, and Rebecca West. These chapters, organized chronologically, explore the press coverage from Robert Jackson's opening statement through the final verdict at the Einsatzgruppen trial. Neumahr ends with an analysis of Golo Mann's advocacy for the release of Rudolf Hess, charting a facet of the trial's legacy into the 1980s.

Throughout the book, Neumahr captures the personal and professional connections of the reporters who covered the trial. He sets up these interactions with the first chapter, which is devoted to the press camp. Over three hundred journalists were housed on the grounds of the Faber-Castell estate in crowded conditions, often sleeping ten to a room. There one could find John Steinbeck brushing his teeth while John Dos Passos splashed in a bathtub and Ernest Hemmingway, wrapped only in a towel, complained about the quality of the local wine. Neumahr captures the chaotic conditions of the camp through the letters of Ernest Cecil Deane, liaison between the press and the courthouse. As the reporters drank, danced, and competed to bear witness to the trial of the century, Deane negotiated the politics that shaped the press camp. The Soviet authorities limited Russian reporters’ contact with the Western press corps, moving them into a separate villa. German journalists had to find their own accommodations and bitterly protested that they had access to just seven seats in the courthouse. Neumahr represents the press camp as the site from which its revolving population of journalists pushed the boundaries of traditional reportage to describe the Nazis’ crimes.

In each of the chapters devoted to the journalists, Neumahr traces their prewar careers and relationships before treating their coverage of the trial. He illustrates that the revelations at Nuremberg challenged the authors to find a language capable of capturing the defendants and their crimes. While many resorted to crass sensationalism or the banal recounting of mind-numbing statistics, the reporters that form the core of the book transformed their literary style in reaction to the trials. For example, Janet Flanner found herself incapable of maintaining a cool distance in her New Yorker article that covered Robert Jackson's cross examination of Hermann Göring. Instead, she represented their encounter as a duel between good and evil, in which Jackson proved an incompetent match for the diabolically brilliant Göring. Her displeased editor, Harold Ross, replaced Flanner with Rebecca West, who restored the balance of power in Jackson's favor. Martha Gellhorn, whose passionate prose recounted the horrors of Dachau, found herself empty when the final verdicts were announced. Gellhorn retreated to conventional, colorless reportage, with no illusions that the trial paved the way for a more just, humane world.

The reporters also reflected on the German people's responsibility for the Third Reich throughout their coverage of the trial. Neumahr argues that the press corps largely shared the British diplomat Robert Vansittart's view that the Nazis expressed the German national character, an innate flaw to be cured only by a thorough process of demilitarization, reeducation, and prolonged occupation by the Western powers. Gellhorn and Erika Mann, in particular, spared the Germans no mercy in their writings, and both vowed to never return to Germany after their time in Nuremberg. Only Willy Brandt and Wolfgang Hildesheimer came to believe that their fellow nationals, while bearing responsibility for the Third Reich, were not collectively guilty. Neumahr's concluding chapter wrestles with the question of German guilt and the degree to which the verdicts at Nuremberg represented a kind of justice. He does so through an analysis of Golo Mann's support for the release of Rudolf Hess. Neumahr here might be too forgiving with regard to Mann's political shift to the right and the politics of Franz Josef Strauss. It was a three-way conflict between Mann, his father and sister, and the larger questions of justice at Nuremberg serve as a fitting, if rather abrupt, conclusion to the book.

Uwe Neumahr draws on a rich array of sources to capture the trial's effects on the reporters and their writing styles, demonstrating that no-one left Nuremberg unchanged by what they had witnessed. A real strength of the work is Neumahr's treatment of the typically overlooked female journalists. Housed separately from the men, Gellhorn, West, Flanner, and Erika Mann frequently added a feminist critique to both Nazism and the trials. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book is a bestseller in Germany. Overall, Das Schloss der Schriftsteller offers a multi-perspective view of the trials, the question of German guilt, and the impact of both on the journalists who gathered in Nuremberg.