On November 20, 1945, twenty-four individuals stood in the dock at Nuremberg, accused of waging aggressive wars, establishing slave labor, exterminating racial and religious groups, and other crimes against humanity. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death by hanging, seven received prison terms ranging from ten years to life, and three were acquitted. The highest ranking condemned man, Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-comand and the most flamboyant and unyielding defendant in the dock, committed suicide just hours before his scheduled execution. As Telford Taylor, a Nuremberg prosecutor and historian of the trials, remarks, bringing these notable Nazis, and later other military and civilian criminals, to justice was a profound advance in international penal law ratified by the United Nations. But the Nuremberg precedent met with a good deal of ambivalence and doubt, since the trials were conducted by the victors in war and the courtroom was suffused with the personalities not only of the defendants and their prosecutors, but also of the journalists who bore witness to the proceedings.

As reporters covering the Nuremberg trials, Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner, and Rebecca West are of continuing interest for their accounts of what took place. Of the three, only Martha Gellhorn had been a war correspondent. In part, this turn of events was the product of timing. Gellhorn was born in 1908. As a writer, she was approaching her prime during the Spanish Civil War, and her experiences there equipped her magnificently for her role in reporting World War II(recently