If, for many years, scholarly attention concerning the trials of Nazi criminals after World War II focused largely on the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, that has changed dramatically in the last decade or so. A slew of monographs have appeared dealing with both individual trials and with the broader history of Nazi prosecutions. The twelve so-called successor trials, conducted before American Military Tribunals at Nuremberg, have in particular begun to attract sustained scholarly attention, both as historically significant examples of “transitional justice” in action and as key elements in America's experiment in nation building in occupied Germany. Valerie Hébert's study of the Nuremberg High Command case is a welcome addition to this literature.

Hébert is particularly interested in two aspects of the American project at Nuremberg. The first is the Americans' quest for justice for Nazi atrocities. The second is their attempt to use the successor trials for didactic purposes, to teach the Germans about both the breadth and depth of Nazi criminality. It was hoped that this judicial pedagogy would contribute to the democratization of postwar Germany. According to Hébert, the High Command Case, the last of the American trials at Nuremberg, was especially important in this regard because it dealt with high-ranking military officers. The social prestige of the military remained high in Germany and, at the same time, for the Americans, “militarism” had been nearly as culpable in Germany's violent assault on Europe as had Nazism. Teaching the Germans the evils of their army was a crucial task for the High Command Case. (Another Nuremberg successor trial, the so-called Hostages Case, had similarly dealt with military crimes, but in a more restricted area).

Across seven chapters, Hébert traces not only the course of the trial, but also its pre- and post-histories. The three core chapters of the book present the prosecution's case, the defense's counterarguments, and, finally, the court's own interpretation in its ruling. The prosecution argued for an expansive interpretation of international law, especially as it pertained to criminal conspiracy, command responsibility, and the understanding of crimes against peace. At the same time, it presented voluminous and often damning evidence against the individual defendants, demonstrating their awareness of and participation in a wide range of Nazi atrocities. The defense, predictably, rejected the prosecution's arguments, calling into question both the court's jurisdiction and the law upon which it relied as violations of German sovereignty and the prohibitions on ex post facto law. Since the defense attorneys could less easily reject the concrete evidence against their clients, they relied instead on numerous character witnesses to testify to the defendants' good morals and high character. What Hébert does not consider in this chapter is whether this attempt by the defense to shift the terms of debate away from the actions to the motives of the accused might have been as much a reflection of German legal culture as it was a tactical response to the evidence. German criminal law typically focuses more intently on matters of character than its American counterpart does. Indeed, in later Nazi trials under German law, the defense would often enjoy considerable success by stressing the good morals of the defendants. In the High Command case, the defense largely failed to impress the court with such arguments. Yet the court, as Hébert demonstrates quite clearly, was equally skeptical of the prosecution's rather capacious reading of international law. Instead, the court rejected the conspiracy charge entirely, as well as the charge of crimes against peace. Instead, it focused on the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity where direct, individual involvement could be demonstrated for a given defendant. In effect, the court rejected the prosecution's argument that the German military had been part of a criminal system, insisting instead that some, but not all, of the defendants had made individual decisions to engage directly in criminal actions.

In two particularly interesting and important chapters (two and six), Hébert analyzes German reactions to the Nuremberg trials in general and to the High Command Case in particular. What is striking in her account is the ways in which, contrary to American hopes and expectations, it was the defense, rather than the prosecution, that set the tone for public perceptions of the Nuremberg trials. Not only did most major organs of German public life, ranging from the government to the churches, lobby on behalf of convicted defendants, but they also did so in language borrowed from the defense in the trials. As a consequence of German efforts on behalf of convicted war criminals, especially the high-ranking officers from the High Command case, the Americans felt increasing political pressure to modify their sentences, eventually releasing all defendants sentenced to long terms of imprisonment early.

In her thoughtful conclusion, Hébert ponders whether the High Command case met either of the goals—justice and pedagogy—set for it by its American organizers. American Chief of Counsel Telford Taylor had predicted upon the conclusion of the trials, that “as time goes on we will hear more about Nuremberg rather than less” (p. 150). This proved not to be the case. Hébert is quite pessimistic about the trials' didactic impact. “The record of the Wehrmacht's criminal past, let alone the convicts' personal contributions to Nazi crimes, had made virtually no impact on German public consciousness” (p. 196). This pedagogical failure was linked, on Hébert's reading, to the trial's broader failure to enact justice. While it is true that the trial helped to develop and apply criminal law to political atrocities, and insofar served justice, the failure adequately to punish those convicted undermined the whole project. “It is punishment that gives a trial the capacity to serve the ends of history, memory, and justice” (p. 203). The Americans' “abandonment of punishment … undermined the message [of] Nuremberg” (pp. 203–04).

Hébert's conclusion is a deeply and appropriately historical one. She refuses to exclude the possibility that didactic trials might work but insists that, in this case, they did not. This may not be a shocking conclusion to historians. One can only hope that the often less historically minded boosters of international legalism and transitional justice will take heed as well.