From the Introduction

In the solemn gal­leries of London’s Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um there is a sim­ply framed six-foot oil paint­ing depict­ing the dock of Court­room 600 in Nuremberg’s Palace of Jus­tice. It por­trays twen­ty of the twen­ty-one Nazi lead­ers who appeared there between 20 Novem­ber 1945 and 1 Octo­ber 1946 to face charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against human­i­ty, and con­spir­a­cy to com­mit these crimes.

The defen­dants do not look like killers but weary bureau­crats. Their aging heads are weighed down by cum­ber­some head­phones, they wear ill-fit­ting suits, and their shoul­ders are hunched as they pore over sheaves of papers or stare off into space. One fig­ure in the cen­ter fore­ground clutch­es his head. The ges­ture is ambigu­ous: is he dis­mayed, racked with guilt or shame, or sim­ply exhaust­ed and defeat­ed? Two rows of lawyers in black robes sit just in front of the defen­dants. They too bow their heads, to study their papers, and frown as they lis­ten to the evi­dence being trans­lat­ed and relayed through their head­phones. Behind the pris­on­ers stands a line of white-hel­met­ed guards in smart green uni­forms. They look young and upright, moral­ly and phys­i­cal­ly, by com­par­i­son with the slumped ranks of offi­cials and defendants.

The true pow­er of the paint­ing lies far­ther into its back­ground. The far wall of the court­room has been oblit­er­at­ed to show fire and ruin, heaps of bod­ies, star­va­tion, grief, and despair — the cat­a­stro­phe wrought by the men in the dock. Smoke ris­es over twist­ed met­al and the rub­ble of bombed-out hous­es. On the hori­zon, the war is still blaz­ing. And just in front of the unsee­ing men, on the defense’s bench­es, are piled naked corpses: their vic­tims. On the very front bench, a thin white arm (corpse or sur­vivor, we can­not know) slips into the courtroom.

This paint­ing was com­mis­sioned to cap­ture an unprece­dent­ed moment: the first time in his­to­ry that for­mer lead­ers of a regime would be held to account in an inter­na­tion­al tri­bunal. Its mood is des­o­late and yet curi­ous­ly mun­dane. It depicts a work­ing court, but this is no ordi­nary work­place. It shows a reck­on­ing with years of sys­temic hor­ror, a pro­ce­dur­al effort to ascer­tain whether jus­tice can find the words to describe evil and the mech­a­nism to pun­ish it. Because there is evil in the room. You can see it in the strick­en expres­sions of the lawyers, in the flat gazes of the accused. It hangs in the air along with sour sweat and anxiety.

I have seen repro­duc­tions of this paint­ing so many times that the image is seared on my mind. This is the Nurem­berg I have come to know: a court­room crammed with lawyers, Nazis, and mil­i­tary. This Nurem­berg fea­tures a roll call of famous and infa­mous men. There is the Amer­i­can chief pros­e­cu­tor Robert Jack­son, whose open­ing speech was broad­cast all over the world; the prin­ci­pal defen­dant Her­mann Göring, whose men­da­cious charis­ma observers found end­less­ly com­pelling; there are celebri­ty writer-reporters like John Dos Pas­sos and ground­break­ing legal the­o­rists like Her­sch Lauterpacht.

But the more famil­iar I became with the image, the more I found it impos­si­ble to see beyond a glar­ing absence.

There is not a sin­gle woman in the picture.

Not in the dock, nor in the row of mil­i­tary per­son­nel behind it; not on the bench­es full of lawyers, nor the crowd­ed tables that linger hazi­ly in front of the dis­ap­pear­ing back wall. The paint­ing presents the sto­ry of a mod­ern Armaged­don con­duct­ed by men, fought by men, inflict­ed on men, pros­e­cut­ed by men, and, ulti­mate­ly, judged by men. It’s a pic­ture of the blood­i­est cat­a­stro­phe in human his­to­ry with half of human­i­ty paint­ed out.

The Sec­ond World War, more so than any oth­er war before it, was also fought, suf­fered, endured, chron­i­cled, and, as I hope this book will show, ulti­mate­ly wit­nessed and pros­e­cut­ed by women. Rough­ly 350,000 women served with the US armed forces in the Sec­ond World War, and about one in five of the French Resis­tance were women; 640,000 women served in the British armed forces as part of orga­ni­za­tions such as the Women’s Roy­al Naval Ser­vice, the Women’s Aux­il­iary Air Force, and the Aux­il­iary Ter­ri­to­r­i­al Ser­vice. Jour­nal­ists who were women made their way to the front lines in the course of the con­flict, demand­ing the right to report from wher­ev­er men did. And grow­ing up as the grand­daugh­ter of Holo­caust sur­vivors, I was intense­ly aware that the crimes the Nurem­berg war tri­als pros­e­cut­ed were as painful­ly rel­e­vant to women’s his­to­ry as men’s. The num­bers bare­ly tell the sto­ry of female vic­tims of the Holo­caust: 2 mil­lion of the 6 mil­lion who were mur­dered were women; there were camps, like Ravens­brück, where only women were mur­dered. With­in the Third Reich, at least 35,000 women were traf­ficked and raped via a net­work of 500 broth­els, while the num­ber of women raped in the occu­pied Sovi­et Union alone may have been as high as 10 mil­lion. And yet, when it came to the Nurem­berg tri­als, the moment of account­abil­i­ty for these bar­barous crimes, I was met by the same male cast. Count­less books, films, and doc­u­men­taries told the sto­ry of Nurem­berg. I nev­er asked why there were no women among their number.

Con­front­ed by the paint­ing, I looked again. In what would lat­er feel like an uncan­ny fore­shad­ow­ing of every­thing I learned while writ­ing this book, I had to lean in and look care­ful­ly in order to see the sig­na­ture at all. The paint­ing was the work of Lau­ra Knight, a British woman. She had paint­ed the scene from life.

Lau­ra Knight was six­ty-eight when she arrived in Nurem­berg. A high­ly suc­cess­ful painter sent there by the War Artists Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee to record what was hap­pen­ing in the court­room, she arrived feel­ing awestruck by the mag­ni­tude of the task. As well as cap­tur­ing the scene in oils, she metic­u­lous­ly doc­u­ment­ed her expe­ri­ence in a diary. Stored in her archive in Not­ting­ham and com­posed in blue ink on loose sheets of paper, it recounts her per­son­al expe­ri­ence at the tri­al in vivid and grip­ping detail. It set me on a path to find the oth­er women who, like her, had been left out of the picture. 

I found the reporters first. Many of the writ­ers and jour­nal­ists who came from across the world to cov­er the tri­als were housed in a cas­tle belong­ing to the Faber-Castell fam­i­ly on an estate in Stein, just a few miles south­west of Nurem­berg. In a neat acci­dent of his­to­ry, those pro­fes­sion­al­ly tasked with writ­ing the sto­ry of the Nurem­berg tri­als were housed on the estate of a fam­i­ly who had become rich by man­u­fac­tur­ing pen­cils. The men were accom­mo­dat­ed in the cas­tle, the women in an old dow­er house known as the Faber-Castell vil­la, where they shared a sin­gle derelict bath­room plumbed with a uri­nal. They drank each other’s vod­ka, edit­ed each other’s copy, and debat­ed the biggest issues of the day, includ­ing jus­tice, gen­der, and the post­war order. If jour­nal­ism is the first draft of his­to­ry, then the first draft of the his­to­ry of the Sec­ond World War and the Holo­caust was writ­ten at the Faber-Castell estate, and plen­ty of it by women.

From THE NUREM­BERG WOMEN: The Untold Sto­ry of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Jus­tice by Natal­ie Liv­ing­stone. Copy­right © 2026 by the author and reprint­ed by per­mis­sion of St. Martin’s Pub­lish­ing Group.