Genocide on Trial.

Nuremberg: The Reckoning, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Harcourt, 366 pp., $25)

They were supposed to throw themselves on the pyre. That, the Roman historian Tacitus said, was ever the German way: Better to perish in the conflagration than outlive the tribe's defeat. In the last days of the war, the German leader, holed up in his bunker, plotted the fireworks in which the Reich was to be consumed. "If the war is to be lost," Hitler told Albert Speer in March 1945, "the nation will also perish." There was "no need to consider the basis even of a most primitive [national] existence any longer." On the contrary, Hitler said, "it is better to destroy even that, and to destroy it ourselves." What remained of the German industrial base was to be demolished; and the German leaders were to fall on their swords.

It didn't happen that way. The end of the war found many of the Reich's viziers unreconciled to their doom. Even before Hitler's corpse had been burned in the chancellery garden, Himmler had attempted to open a negotiation with the Allies. Goering, the tyrant's designated heir, had declared himself "ready to fly personally to General Eisenhower" to arrange a capitulation. They soon discovered that the Allies were in no mood to bargain. At the same time, however, there was disagreement among the victors themselves about what ought to be done with the remnant of the Nazi leadership. Churchill, for his part, talked of rounding the high priests up and shooting them dead.

In his provocative new novel, Nuremberg: The Reckoning, William F. Buckley Jr. recreates the Allies' efforts to pronounce a more considered judgment upon the vanquished. The setting for the experiment was carefully chosen; Nuremberg was one of the holiest cities of National Socialism, a place where some of its most gigantic altars had been raised, and where, in the autumn of 1945, the disagreeable odors of its incense still hung heavily in the air. The fanatic citadel had not long before fallen to the American Seventh Army, and in his book Buckley brings the broken city to life. At the center is the Palace of Justice, where, Buckley writes, the defeated satraps, stripped of their badges of rank and honor, were "monitored twenty-four hours a day by jailers looking through slits in the cell doors, a naked overhead light on, day and night."

The book is immensely engaging. Buckley excels at taking an exceedingly intricate historical record and imposing order on it through his gift for language, the easy elegance of a master of the English sentence. The plot of this, his 15th novel, is skillfully woven and tells the story of Sebastian Reinhard, who with his mother fled Hamburg in 1939 to sail to the United States, and who returns to Germany in 1945 to assist the prosecutors at Nuremberg. After vicissitudes the young man, now an American army officer, makes a double discovery: He learns the truth about both his father's fate and his own heritage.

Nuremberg is a work of fiction, not a polemical essay; but the book raises important (and timely) questions about the kind of justice defeated bad guys deserve. There is an illuminating moment when Lieutenant Reinhard is ushered into the office of one of the prosecutors working under Robert H. Jackson, the American chief counsel at Nuremberg. "Looking for my law library?" Captain Carver, a military lawyer, asks his visitor. "Well, let me tell you something. There is no library for what we're up to. I mean, the IMT -- that's the International Military Tribunal -- is something brand new."

The "judicial and moral imaginations" had come together, Buckley writes, to try "to write into the empty spaces of international law a fresh covenant: that war crimes were definable. And punishable as criminal behavior." How far they succeeded remains a question. If Nuremberg traces the evolution of Lieutenant Reinhard's understanding of himself, it also uncovers those deficiencies in comprehension that undermined the efforts of Reinhard's superiors to prosecute the surviving Nazi leaders in the Palace of Justice.

Nothing could have been more devastating to the cause of those defendants than the footage of the death camps that Justice Jackson (on leave from the U.S. Supreme Court) arranged to have shown in open court. The film laid bare the reality of the Nazi charnelworks, the death vaults, the gas pipes, the furnaces. It exposed, Buckley writes, "butchery, torture, starvation." Anyone who views those scenes and is not a moral blockhead instinctively feels that those responsible for the degradation deserved the gibbet. The task of the Nuremberg tribunal was to turn this felt inarticulate revulsion into solid blocks of judicial masonry.

At a minimum the Allied lawyers needed to explain what the limits of acceptable conduct are, and to show that the Nazi leaders transgressed them. This work of drawing distinctions between different kinds of acts would have helped the world to understand why, for example, bombing campaigns in which civilians die are in certain circumstances within the civilized pale, but extermination camps are not. The Allied lawyers, however, shrank from this work; Buckley's novel is, in part, the story of their intellectual timidity, their inability to move from rhetoric to analysis. The crimes alleged in the indictments were broadly and inexactly defined; the briefs were loosely and hastily constructed. Goering, that crafty voluptuary, took advantage of the intellectual confusion. The former commander of the Luftwaffe was now, after months of incarceration, less grotesquely obese than he had been at the height of his power, but his features, those of a bloated mandarin, retained their look of cruel refinement. He languidly turned Jackson's questions against the prosecution. Within "what seemed like mere minutes," Buckley writes, his "dialectical prowess had apparently unsettled" the lead American counsel.

What went wrong? It is important to remember that Nuremberg was not simply an exercise in applying law; it was an exercise in making law. And something more than a legal imagination is required to make laws. The prosecutors, ambitious after the manner of the American law courts, were eager to rack up convictions, and the hurry that is written into their pleadings was evident, too, in the shallowness of their legal trowel-work, their contentedness with the surfaces of malignant action. Busy they were; but lazy in their imagination of their role.

Effective lawmakers are like good gardeners; they get at the root of the weed. The Allied lawyers merely plucked at the fruit. They concentrated narrowly on Nazi malfeasances during the war. This was a mistake; the wartime conduct of the Germans was only one manifestation of the deeper evils of the Nazi regime. The Allied lawyers strained over specific bad acts; they never dug down to the more profound corruption of the root- stock. To discover the fundamental crime of the German revolution, it is necessary to look beyond the ugliness of the war. It is necessary to examine the philosophy of Hitler, and to come to terms with his repudiation of civilization's ongoing labor to find ways to sustain each individual human life: to cherish it as a thing of beauty, "a garden inclosed," in the language of the Scriptures.

It is true, of course, that many peoples professing to honor the master- principle of human flourishing have failed to live up to it. But there is a difference between a falling-off from an ideal and its deliberate repudiation. The Nazi enormities, bad as they are in themselves, were made infinitely worse by the intention and purpose that underlay them. Those acts cannot be ascribed to inadvertence, or carelessness, or overzealous subalterns; nor can they be blamed on the heat and passion of the moment, the exigencies of battle, or the imperative of self-defense. They were the logical consequence of the constitution and orthodoxies of the National Socialist state, the dogmas that held that certain classes of people possess no human beauty, or too small a share of it to justify their continued existence on earth. (The dogmas of the competitor revolutionary creed, of course, held that, whatever beauty an individual soul might possess, such loveliness was not enough to justify its continued existence if it stood in the way of the surpassingly beautiful world the revolutionaries intended to create. One of the defects of the Nuremberg tribunal, Buckley's novel suggests, is that representatives of the competitor creed -- Stalin's liege men -- acted as prosecutors and sat as judges in the Palace of Justice.)

Should it be a crime to participate in the work of a state -- any state, not just the Nazi one -- that has repudiated both a civilized ideal and the numerous correlative principles that flow from it? This is the question the Nuremberg lawyers needed to reach but didn't. The tribunal's definition of "crimes against humanity" -- a definition that encompasses "inhumane acts committed against civilian populations" -- does not help us to distinguish between the actions of the Nazis and those excesses, mistakes, and heat-of-the-battle decisions that, however terrible they may be, do not reflect a calculated and deliberate attempt to deny human dignity, and so do not call into question the legitimacy of the moral architecture of the regime under which they occur.

The Nuremberg tribunal, had it attempted to draw these distinctions, must have ended by establishing a law of the rogue state. The work of creating a code setting forth the characteristics of malicious authority would have been a truly useful one, as valuable now as then. Under such a statute, a state that systematically denied people the various protections of life, liberty, and property would risk outlawry. Its governors would be answerable to the world. The promulgation of such an ordinance might have helped take the world beyond a moral relativism -- not yet extinguished -- that uncritically equates the actions of the United States with those of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Buckley, in his book, hints at the way the Allied lawyers connived at the perpetuation of these fallacies by failing, at Nuremberg, to expose the barrenness of that logic.

There is a scene in the novel in which Buckley describes what happened after the footage of the death camps was shown in the Palace of Justice. The screen went blank, and for a time there was silence. "Then Sebastian could hear the general murmur of horror, and a ululation from someone in the spectators' gallery." The ululo -- literally, the shriek of the screech-owl -- is the cry of women at the pagan sacrifice, the ololuge of the ancient Greeks. In Nuremberg the wail is a dirge for the six million. Justice Jackson's declamations were not adequate to those griefs; perhaps nothing can be. This haunting, chastening book forces the reader to rethink the meaning of that bloody revival of paganism six and seven decades ago; but though it is rich in history the novel is not merely historical in its reach. With subtlety and skill it brings the reader to reflect, not simply on how men and women in the past confronted the evil in and around them, but on how we ourselves do today.