Thursday, December 18, 2025

"I Was the Nuremberg Jailer" Book Review

 


When the “Master Race” Sat in a Jail Cell
A powerful book unveils Nazism after the lights went out.

I Was the Nuremberg Jailer is 211 pages long, inclusive of an index and black-and-white photographs. Coward-McCann Incorporated published Nuremberg Jailer in 1969 and it is currently out of print. I found a copy through inter-library loan. It is also available at Archive.org.

I've read a lot of books about World War II. I Was the Nuremberg Jailer may be my favorite. It's a punchy, no-nonsense exposé by US Army Colonel Burton C. Andrus. For eighteen months, Andrus served as commandant of the prison housing twenty-one Nazis who were to face the International Military Tribunal, or IMT, at Nuremberg in post-World-War-II Germany in 1945.