As the granddaughter of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, British author Natalie Livingstone wasn’t just fascinated by World War II history, she was determined to excavate it.
While negotiating the galleries inside London’s Imperial War Museum, she found herself beholding an arresting 6-foot oil painting simply titled “The Nuremberg Trial.” The defining artwork of the “trial of the century” depicts the desolate dock of Courtroom 600 inside the infamous Palace of Justice. In the haunting backdrop lies the occupied city in ruins, once considered the spiritual home of the Third Reich.
The historian observed another striking detail: the staggering piece reveals a sea of stern, solemn and stricken figures including Nazi defendants, soldiers and lawyers — all of whom are men.
But when she peered closer, Livingstone made out the tiny signature: Laura Knight, a celebrated 68-year-old female British artist who painted the scene from life.
“There is not a single woman in the picture,” Livingstone told The Post. “It’s a picture of the bloodiest catastrophe in human history with half of humanity painted out.”
Livingstone knew that wasn’t the full picture and was determined to uncover the truth.
It was that burning question that set the author on a four-year journey to produce her riveting new book, “The Nuremberg Women: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice,” which shines a spotlight on the fascinating women, ignored by history, who were involved with the landmark post-WWII tribunals that prosecuted 21 Nazi war criminals.
The eight wildly intriguing women profiled were more than mere witnesses to history — they shaped it.
“In order to really understand Nuremberg, in order to really appreciate it from these women’s perspectives,” Livingstone said, “You’ve got to see it as an ecosystem.”
That ecosystem included a brilliant American prosecutor who legally smoked notorious Nazi leaders; three hungry journalists with competing motivations; a besotted artist with misbegotten admiration; a glamorous refugee aristocrat with deep misgivings; an indefatigable Auschwitz survivor who lent her voice to the voiceless; and a conflicted young Russian translator who haltingly pieced together a disturbing geopolitical puzzle that foreshadowed the Cold War.
Each pioneer played a vital role at the International Military Tribunal, known as the IMT, according to the author. The women would reveal “a much more diverse, more haphazard, more human and intimate” Nuremberg than believed.
They descended on the demolished former Nazi center of gravity for reasons as varied as their backgrounds, classes and nationalities: to see justice up close, to burnish reputations and confer prestige, to jumpstart professional and personal mojo, and to evade deportation or even death.
When the trial — established by the Allied US, British, French and the Soviet Union powers — started in November 1945, WWII had just ended and the world was still largely in the dark about the breadth of Nazi crimes against humanity. Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler had already committed suicide in a feeble attempt to evade judgment. The horrors of the death camps, Auschwitz and crematoriums were not yet widespread.
But that soon changed, thanks to one fearless witness who rose from the ashes of Auschwitz.
Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier’s two hours of breathtaking testimony transformed the face of the trial — which two months in, settled into a “predictable and familiar” rhythm.
The 33-year-old French resistance fighter survived three years inside camps including Auschwitz and, as the author writes, “she was ready to tell her story … She would transport [the courtroom] to the gates of a hell that she and so few others had survived.”
With a steady voice and suppression of sobs, Vaillant-Couturier described the immediate drowning of Jewish newborns, and Jewish women who were “gassed for practically no reason at all,” including a wholesale “scabies block” that could have been cured within three days with a simple remedy. She testified to 450 out of 500 typhus patients being sent to the gas chamber.
Her unflinching testimony of Nazi brutality, dedicated to those who could no longer speak for themselves, brought the courtroom, and the world, to its knees.
Her “final act of defiance” came on her way out the door, writes Livingstone: she “walked deliberately along the front of the dock, fixing her gaze on each of the indicted Nazis, one after the other.”
As one of only four women who took the stand out of 100 total witnesses, the survivor spent less than 24 hours in Nuremberg.
Vaillant-Couturier couldn’t bring herself to spend an extra minute in the onetime “City of the Nazi Party Rallies,” according to postcards. This was a sharp contrast to some wide-eyed visitors who couldn’t tear themselves away from the unlikely bacchanal.
After toiling in town for months, artist Laura Knight wrote to her septuagenarian husband, Harold, that she longed to return to him in England. Yet Nuremberg — and the unpredictable evenings of acrobats, Hungarian dancers and cabaret at the Grand Hotel, best enjoyed with her favorite White Lady cocktail — beckoned.
Knight extended her cushy stay at the hotel that became irresistibly titillating. “My suite was built for Hitler. It seems that he first came here to stay at the Hotel when he had just started his doings,” she gushed in a letter to Harold, confusing the Grand with the now-destroyed Deutscher Hof.
“I often wonder if Hitler himself slept in my room,” she mused, speculating about sleeping on the same pillow as the Fuhrer. She exulted in “sleep[ing] so soundly after days spent in listening to the horrors brought about by his descent from the idealism of his beginning to that of overweening ambition.”
Even as her tenure overlapped with the French Holocaust survivor, the stomach-churning testimony evidently didn’t make a dent in the artist’s sleep — or her appetite.
Knight noted “lots of good vegetables” and “more meat than I can eat” inside the VIP dining room within the Palace of Justice where she lunched with “extra specials in court.” The author summed up Knight’s eyebrow-raising accounts as that of a renowned artist “who both desired and admired status.”
But it was a nocturnal Nuremberg that became the painter’s true canvas.
“She really loved being treated like a VIP,” Livingstone said, adding that the 68-year-old loved to visit judicial villas, host cocktail parties and flirt with the young soldiers. “There are tales of her hanging from the chandeliers.”
“Far from it being just about a courtroom, this was a city in which drama, gossip, scandal and the full panoply of human life were out in force,” said Livingstone.
Nuremberg served as an unlikely backdrop for hot and heavy romances, with even unlikelier matchups.
When eminent British journalist Rebecca West wasn’t capturing poignant contrasts “between the high, lofty ideals of the trial and the everyday mundanity of it,” said Livingstone, she was embracing “her great blossoming at the age of 53.”
Married American judge Francis Biddle had a hand in that — forging a feverish summertime affair with the writer who famously described IMT as a “citadel of boredom.” Yet after leaving for weeks, she found her way back to the tribunal by the fall — to cover the Oct. 1, 1946, verdict and rekindle her passionate affair with the judge.
Less torrid, the 22-year-old Soviet interpreter Tatiana Stupnikova met her future husband in Nuremberg in what Livingstone writes as “perhaps the most romantic love story of any of the women of Nuremberg.”
And 36-year-old American prosecutor Harriet Zetterberg conceived her first child during the trial’s winter break with her fellow lawyer husband, Daniel.
Though many glass ceilings were shattered at Nuremberg — the first female witness who was an Auschwitz survivor using her voice to send shockwaves through the court, Knight’s commission from WAAC for her monumental and enduring work — some ceilings did little more than crack.
She may have helped secure the conviction of notorious Nazi leader Hans Frank — dubbed the “Butcher of Poland” for overseeing more than four million deaths — but as a woman, Zetterberg was barred from speaking in court.
As much as the women each transformed Nuremberg in her own way, Nuremberg very much transformed them.
Zetterberg, sent home from the trial while pregnant, never attained professional fulfillment again — unable to find meaningful work once back stateside. The Yale-trained brilliant legal mind collected a secretary’s hourly wage of $2.50 while working as a legal aide.
“Nuremberg was this bubble, this moment in time, that afforded some women levels of power and influence that they were denied after they left the trial,” said Livingstone.
The lessons learned were painful and poignant.
“Even after witnessing the near collapse of civilization, it was still possible to live, to love, to create and to believe in humanity again,” said the author. “And to believe in the idea that even though these women were not in a position of power, they still were able to be powerful.”
