Just a Kid
A Guard at the Nuremberg Trials

He was barely old enough to shave. Barely old enough to understand the war that had reshaped the world.

But he was old enough to be on the front line and old enough to stand guard over history.

In the shadow of the shattered Third Reich, inside the heavily guarded courtroom in Nuremberg, Emilio DiPalma, a young American soldier—just a kid by his own reckoning—finds himself assigned to one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century: the Nuremberg Trials.

Day after day, he stands only feet away from the defeated architects of Nazi terror—men who once commanded armies and orchestrated atrocities across Europe. He watches as evidence of the Holocaust is revealed to the world. He listens as translators carry words that will define justice for generations. And he struggles to reconcile the ordinary faces before him with the unimaginable crimes they’re accused of committing.

Through the eyes of a young guard far from home, Just a Kid brings readers inside the tense courtroom, the prison corridors, and the quiet moments between history’s headlines. It is a story not only about judgment and accountability, but about youth confronted with evil, innocence meeting responsibility, and a generation forced to grow up too fast.

Raw, intimate, and deeply human, "Just a Kid , a Guard at the Nuremberg Trials" offers a rare perspective on the trials that changed international law—and on the young soldier who witnessed it.