On Monday 28 January 1946, a slight, neat French woman with her hair coiled around her head took the stand at Nuremberg. In the dock were twenty-four of the most senior Nazis, indicted for conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and the new concept of crimes against humanity. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier was the first female witness. A survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, she described with great precision the terrifying roll calls, the hunger, the brutality and the gassings. When she finished, she walked slowly past the defendants, looking at them closely one by one. ‘For years’, she told the International Military Tribunal, ‘we had one wish only: the wish that some of us would escape alive, in order to tell the world.’ Her friends in the camps had provided her with scraps of paper on which she had written detailed notes in minuscule letters, then carefully hidden them away.

Vaillant-Couturier is one of eight women in Natalie Livingstone’s account of the Nuremberg hearings. The idea that frames her book is simple: in memoirs, diaries, reporting and photographs, the Nuremberg trials have always been portrayed as an essentially male affair, in which women played no role. To the contrary, Livingstone argues, women were everywhere: in the courtroom, the press gallery, among the teams of lawyers. Not only were they present but, in their own reporting and later accounts, they gave far more human, intimate and realistic portraits of the proceedings, which deserve to take their place in the vast literature on the subject. Livingstone makes their individual stories her narrative.

The eight women were a mixed bunch. At sixty-eight, the British artist Laura Knight was the eldest; she had been sent to paint the Nazis in the dock with their grim expressions and heavy headphones. The youngest was a 22-year-old Russian interpreter, Tatiana Stupnikova, who had served in intelligence with