Talking tough

This thoughtful, challenging and deeply depressing book takes as its launch pad the Nuremberg Trials, in which the author’s father played so prominent a part. Churchill would have executed the Nazi leaders out of hand. Eisenhower wanted to exterminate all the German General Staff as well as all of the Gestapo and all Nazi Party members above the rank of Major. Wiser counsels prevailed. The Nazi leadership must be put on trial, it was agreed, and not in such a way as would rubber-stamp a verdict that had already been tacitly agreed. ‘You must put no man on trial under the forms of judicial proceeding,’ said the distinguished jurist Robert Jackson, ‘if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty.’  

The scale and nature of the threats are different, Shawcross argues, but ‘the ideology of al-Qa’eda and its Islamist associates shares attributes with Nazism; it, too, is totalitarian, and it, too, has anti-Semitism at its core.’