Nuremberg

"This is a book that I was given by a friend of mine in the army when I was working at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. Airey Neave was a soldier and a lawyer – a bit like me, I guess. He served in the infantry during the Second World War and it is very sad that he was blown up by the INLA in the House of Commons car park in 1979. It is an interesting book because it gives his personal account of the events at Nuremberg. He was an army Major then, assigned to serve each of the principal defendants at the main trial with their indictments. He gives a pen picture of each of them and the men that they had become after their arrests and during the Nuremberg tribunal. Well, there were two things. Rebecca West, the journalist who reviewed the book and wrote the foreword to it, describes being in Nuremberg and being at the trials. And she said that the trial was a kind of legalistic prayer. She meant that the war had been so utterly devastating for everyone in Europe, that this was a prayer for help. That made a profound impression on me, in the sense that part of my work is all about passionately believing in a better world. The other thing that had a big impact on me is that, at the end of the book, Neave writes about it being a historic trial and the sincere efforts to bring compassion and decency to the conduct of war. He went on to write that he had no regrets and was among those who helped to expose the Nazis. After the Srebrenica trial I felt the exact feeling very strongly, because the Serbs had denied that those things took place. They refused to admit that anybody had been killed. And we proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that over 8,000 people had been murdered in the space of ten days. After that nobody could deny these events had taken place, and that was important."