A review of Natalie Livingstone’s new book
Natalie Livingstone describes The Nuremberg Women as a “fresh” and “humanising” depiction of the Nuremberg Trials, highlighting eight women—including journalists, interpreters, witnesses, artists, and administrators—whose efforts, she claims, made the proceedings “more democratic” and contributed to the perception that “justice was served.” Nonetheless, the book aligns with contemporary liberal historiography, emphasising personal stories, moral judgments, and depoliticisation. It masks the underlying class conflicts of fascism and neglects the political limitations inherent in the trials.
Livingstone’s book aligns with a recent microhistorical genre that emphasises personal experience rather than broad historical causality, prioritising emotional immediacy over political clarity. This creates a narrative filled with anecdotes but potentially misleading regarding its historical and political significance.
The book has been thoroughly reviewed. Notably, Katja Hoyer’s critique in the TLS stands out from a political viewpoint. Her review of The Nuremberg Women exemplifies a refined form of liberal historiography—graceful and compassionate, yet ultimately evasive. It demonstrates a style that appeals to the reader’s moral instincts while subtly lacking the political and structural context of the event. By lauding Natalie Livingstone’s microhistory, Hoyer reflects a broader ideological pattern: replacing detailed analysis with narrative empathy and transforming structural violence into emotional spectacle. As a result, the review appears to enhance our understanding of Nuremberg but in fact limits it by depicting the women in the trials as moral witnesses rather than active participants in the postwar justice system.
Hoyer aims to humanise the Nuremberg Trials by highlighting women who typed transcripts, translated interrogations, and experienced the surreal environment of occupied Germany. While recognising the importance of reclaiming women’s labour, she does not view these women as part of a gendered labour system. Instead, she portrays them as emotional mediators—conscience bearers, moral stabilisers, and psychological interpreters. This approach is more sentimental than historical, disguising insight with emotion. The women were not merely moral spectators; they were integral to the bureaucratic machinery that facilitated the Allies’ legal theatre. Their work was organised, exploited, and instrumentalised, and reducing them to psychological witnesses ignores the conditions that made their roles necessary.
Nuremberg Without Politics
Hoyer’s review is most revealing in its omissions. The Nuremberg Trials were not simply a moral reckoning with fascism; they were also a geopolitical performance that legitimised the postwar order, a selective prosecution that spared the economic foundations of German imperialism, a mechanism for reintegrating former Nazis into the emerging Cold War state, and a legal spectacle that concealed the class forces behind fascism. Hoyer acknowledges none of this. Instead, she presents the trials as a psychological drama in ruined Germany, witnessed by women whose moral clarity offsets the defendants’ brutality.
This is the liberal fantasy: fascism appears as a moral aberration rather than a structural product of capitalist crisis. Hoyer’s praise for Livingstone’s narrative craft is revealing. She commends the book’s vivid scenes, reconstructed conversations, and psychological atmosphere, but narrative is never neutral. It organises meaning ideologically, privileging the exceptional over the typical, the visible over the structural, and the personal over the political. In Hoyer’s hands, microhistory becomes a way to avoid the larger question: what social forces produced fascism, and what political economy shaped its juridical aftermath? By centering individual women, Hoyer displaces the trials’ structural contradictions, replacing analysis with empathy and empathy with moral reassurance.
The Depoliticisation of Fascism
What is most troubling in Hoyer’s review is its understated depoliticisation of fascism. She presents the Nazi defendants as psychological monsters, the women as moral witnesses, and the trials as a cathartic encounter with evil. The framing is comforting, but historically misleading. Fascism was not a mental pathology; it was a class project, a violent defense of property relations amid capitalist crisis. The Nuremberg Trials did not dismantle that order; they purified its image, punishing the most visible criminals while leaving intact the structures that made their crimes possible. Hoyer cannot confront this because her method forecloses it: liberal humanism can describe the emotional aftermath of structural violence, but not explain its foundations.
Empathy cannot replace analysis. It is not enough to sympathise with the women of Nuremberg; we must examine the conditions that shaped their labour, the political forces that defined their roles, and the ideological purposes their presence served. Hoyer’s review offers emotional satisfaction while withholding historical understanding. It is an elegant evasion.
Katja Hoyer’s review exposes a broader weakness in contemporary historiography: the dominance of liberal sentiment over structural analysis. It presents history as moral reassurance rather than explanation, humanising power instead of scrutinising it. The women of Nuremberg deserve more than the role of emotional witnesses in a liberal morality play. They should be understood as workers, agents, and participants in one of the twentieth century’s most politically charged legal proceedings. To recover that reality, we must move beyond Hoyer’s humanist framing and confront the structural conditions her review leaves untouched.
The Personalisation of History
Livingstone presents the trials through the lives of eight women, including Erika Mann, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Tatiana Stupnikova, Laura Knight, Ursula von Kardoff, Ingeborg Kálnoky, and two others whose roles are framed as morally or emotionally decisive. Their stories are rendered with sympathy and detail. Yet the book’s central claim—that these women’s “human” and “intimate” experiences disclose Nuremberg’s “true” meaning—rests on a false and politically reactionary premise.
Contrary to Livingstone’s account, the Nuremberg Trials were not a moral drama in which personal courage and emotional labour delivered justice. They were a legal response to a crisis of world capitalism, shaped by Allied geopolitical interests and the emerging Cold War. Politically selective and tightly constrained, they could not confront fascism’s social roots. By centering individual experience, Livingstone sidesteps the essential question: what social forces produced fascism, and why did Nuremberg fail to hold them accountable?
The Erasure of Capitalism’s Responsibility for Fascism
Livingstone’s narrative accepts the juridical fiction that fascism was the work of a handful of political criminals. Her focus on the Nazi defendants’ physical and psychological decline, as Erika Mann observed at Camp Ashcan, reinforces this myth. Descriptions of Göring, Streicher, and others as “gaunt,” “broken,” or “like wild beasts in a zoo” are treated as evidence of moral collapse, but this is trivia presented as historical insight. The condition of Nazi leaders in 1945 tells us nothing about the class forces that brought them to power. Fascism arose not from individual pathology, but from the crisis of German capitalism, the destruction of the workers’ movement, and the support of monopoly capital. The industrialists who financed and sustained Hitler—Krupp, Thyssen, and IG Farben—largely avoided serious punishment. Livingstone does not confront this because her framework obscures it. Nuremberg’s failure to indict capitalism was not incidental; it was the trials’ central political limitation, a reality her human-interest narrative conceals.
The Liberal Myth of “Democratic Justice”
Livingstone repeatedly argues that women’s participation made the trials “more democratic” and “more humane.” The claim is sentimental but politically hollow. Women interpreters, journalists, and artists did not alter the trials’ fundamental character, which was determined by the geopolitical aims of the United States and Britain as they moved toward confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Tatiana Stupnikova, the Russian interpreter, exemplifies this problem. Livingstone presents her labour as evidence of international cooperation and moral seriousness. Yet the emerging Cold War shaped every aspect of the trial, as the Allies disputed charges, evidence, and the scope of prosecution. Nuremberg was not a harmonious exercise in global justice, but a site of political conflict. By turning these tensions into background for personal drama, Livingstone reinforces the liberal myth of Nuremberg as a triumph of Western democratic values.
Laura Knight, the British war artist, allows Livingstone to aestheticise the trial. Knight’s paintings are presented as capturing the proceedings’ “humanity,” but this framing has an ideological function: it turns a legally constrained, politically shaped process into a cultural scene of moral reckoning. Art at Nuremberg did not uncover deeper truths; it helped construct the trial’s image as civilised, rational, and humane. Livingstone accepts that image without criticism.
Livingstone presents Ursula von Kardoff, the German journalist, as a symbol of the “new Germany”: a nation prepared to confront its past and embrace democracy. This distorts history. The German bourgeoisie was not remade after 1945; it was preserved. The class forces that supported Hitler were absorbed into the postwar order and realigned with the Western powers against the Soviet Union. Livingstone’s portrayal of Kardoff therefore aids the rehabilitation of the German ruling class by casting its postwar representatives as enlightened democrats.
Gender as Moral Category
Livingstone treats gender in liberal-essentialist terms, casting women as moral anchors, emotional mediators, and guardians of humanity. Their labour—as interpreters, witnesses, reporters, and carers—is presented as inherently humane and democratising. A Marxist analysis, by contrast, understands gender as a social relation rather than a moral category. The gendered labour at Nuremberg shaped the trial’s ideological presentation but did not overcome its political limits. Livingstone’s sentimental feminism humanises the proceedings while obscuring their structural constraints.The Nuremberg Women is polished and readable, but politically reactionary. By personalising history, moralising justice, aestheticising suffering, and erasing fascism’s class roots, Livingstone ultimately reinforces the dominant liberal narrative of the postwar order.
The book’s central claim—that the emotional labour and personal courage of eight women reveal Nuremberg’s “true” meaning—is untenable. Nuremberg can be understood only through a materialist analysis of the social forces that produced fascism and the political limits that shaped the trials.
A Trumpet of Sedition 