ON NOVEMBER 21, 1945, I drove from the little village of Neumarkt, where I worked in a United Nations relief camp as a child welfare officer, to Nuremberg, 16km (10 miles) away, where the trial of the major German war criminals had begun the previous day. I was having dinner at the Grand Hotel (the American high-rank officers’ leisure centre) with my friend George Vassilchikov, a handsome and clever Russian prince, then, like me, in his early twenties, who spoke five languages without accent and would spend the next ten months interpreting simultaneously from Russian into English, English into Russian and also helping out in French and German when needed.

Over that year, George on three occasions got me one of the coveted seats for the trial. Nuremberg, so important to the Nazis, had deliberately been bombed to smithereens, the Palace of Justice and the nearby Grand Hotel being two of the few central buildings left standing. The three days I attended the court, despite the pressure for tickets, were surprisingly quiet and the 240 press seats and the four rows reserved for the public almost empty. The room was full only on the first and last days of the trial, and the days when drama could be expected, such as when Goering, or Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, were testifying.

To me it didn’t matter that the proceedings droned on, without drama: it was enough to observe the faces of those 20 men, some of whose names had been part of my life for seven years. Except for Albert Speer, who was attentive throughout (and whom, years later, I was to get to know well), all of them pretended to be, or perhaps were, bored: they read, scribbled and, at times, until called sharply to order by a judge, closed their eyes: just under a year later, three of them would be acquitted, six sentenced to spend between ten years and life in prison, and 11 would be hanged.

An interesting book just published, The Nuremberg Interviews, which presents 33 thumbnail-sketched profiles and interviews with the defendants and witnesses conducted in 1946 by Leon Goldensohn, an American psychiatrist at Nuremberg prison, is as revealing in the differences it demonstrates in the arguments of these men as in the two principal similarities of their replies. Virtually none of them, except, again, Speer in an impassive manner, manifest guilt or even regret of any kind about what was done, and many of them — in some cases quite reasonably — deny having known about the extermination of the Jews. Also, not a single one of them appears aware that, despite the dangers, individual morality could have inspired them to remove themselves from the Nazi morass.

Among the many things George and I talked about that evening was the question that continues to be asked to this day: whether there was not a better way than having the victors sitting in judgment over the vanquished. Would that, we wondered that night, not pre-empt objectivity and diminish the effect of their eventual decisions?

But what was most on our minds was how, from the very beginning, America dominated the trial. Given that it was taking place in the US zone of occupation, that America financed and, to all intents and purposes, ran it (with a staff of almost 2,000 against Britain’s contingent of 170), was it not only too likely that it would turn into a purely American event? The Americans were in charge of the prison, the 20 defendants and 102 witnesses, and provided all office and communication facilities, most of the administrative and clerical personnel, billeting, transport, food, drink, medical services, and overall security throughout Nuremberg and the eight-mile area around it where thousands of Allied personnel serving the trial were billeted.

Worrying, too, was the immediately apparent animosity between America and Russia and the danger to Europe if the Russians would end up being isolated (as indeed was to happen), not only because the three democracies were ideologically linked, but because Europe, heavily in debt to America, would for years remain unable to oppose any demands they made.

We spoke, too, about how difficult it would be in a Germany still full of unrepentant Nazis, for any Germans, including the media, to publicly come out against the accused.

I have talked over the years at length with many people of Hitler’s circle, among them Luise Jodl, the wife of Hitler’s most brilliant general, the only one who often contradicted him; Traudl Junge, his youngest and most intelligent secretary, who by 1945 had developed serious doubts and subsequently never forgave herself for her devotion to him; and, above all, Albert Speer, his architect and later minister of armaments who, I believe, knew Hitler better than anyone else.

“Jodl (as she always referred to him) would come home late in the night, his face exhausted, his voice hoarse,” Frau Jodl told me. “He didn’t have to say anything; I knew that he had again tried, again failed to dissuade Hitler from one of his crazy decisions which would needlessly kill thousands of soldiers. All I could think of was how to ease his despair, help him to rest.”

So finally they just talked about the weather, the dogs — “just gentle things, of little importance”.

Jodl’s first wife having been an invalid, she said, divorce had, of course, been impossible. “It’s so strange that people thought him cold — he was such a passionate man.”

She and Jodl had agreed at the start of the trial (when, in the lunch hour, they could talk) that at a certain hour every afternoon she would stand below the window of his cell holding a white hankerchief, and he in turn would hold his hankerchief out from his window, the upper part of which he could open about 15in (36km). On a few occasions in those ten months he managed to pull himself up and get half his head out of the window. “We could only just see each other’s faces, but his lawyer told me later that my being there had warmed him,” Frau Jodl said. On October 16, 1946, when she knew the executions would take place during the night (the time decided upon by the Allies to forestall demonstrations), she stood at this spot from midnight until dawn.