I felt that I was watching history, and whenever things threatened to get tedious there was always the simultaneous translation to play with.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 102.  

The next major excitement was the Nuremberg Trials. They had started in November, 1945—six months after the end of the war—and were held before a panel of eight judges, two British, two American, two French, and two Russian. In those early postwar days normal travel was still by train, and at the end of the Christmas recess the two British judges, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence (who presided over the whole thing) and Sir Norman Birkett,21 passed through Paris on their way back to Nuremberg. With Sir Norman were his wife and son Michael, who was almost exactly my age; and to my excitement and delight they invited me to accompany them and stay a few days to watch the proceedings. That night we took the wagon-lit, arriving the next day in the frozen remains of Nuremberg, virtually flattened by Allied bombing. At nine o’clock on the following morning I took my seat in the Visitors’ Gallery of the Palace of Justice—which had somehow remained standing—and excitedly adjusted my headphones: this was my first experience of simultaneous translation and I was determined to make the most of it.

 

And there they were below us, perhaps twenty yards away: apart from Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler—who had committed suicide—all the other principal Nazi leaders whose names we had spoken with loathing throughout the war were arraigned before us in the dock, eleven of them in the front row, ten in the row behind. There in front of me was Goering, next to him Rudolf Hess, then Ribbentrop; further on were Admiral Doenitz, Ernst Kaltenbrunner—principally responsible for carrying out the “Final Solution,” as the Holocaust was known—and the Jew baiter Julius Streicher; and they were only the beginning. Illuminated by harsh fluorescent light, they looked totally impassive, but at the same time drawn and haggard; I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I noticed too that while they listened attentively on their earphones to all that was going on they never addressed a word to each other. Just before they walked out of the courtroom at lunchtime I had taken up a position by the door: as they walked past me I could have touched them. The three days I sat in the court room were not as exciting as many had been, but I was never bored for an instant. I felt that I was watching history, and whenever things threatened to get tedious there was always the simultaneous translation to play with.