The Nuremberg trials after World War II were a watershed in the history of international law. From November 1945 to October 1946, prominent Nazis were put on trial for genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, and pursuing an aggressive war. None of these legal categories existed before the twentieth century, as Phillipe Sands has shown in his monumental work, East West Street.
Francine Hirsch, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sheds new light on the role of the Soviet Union in the trials in her gripping, well-written book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II. She examines the deliberations, machinations and intrigues among the Allied countries, who provided the prosecutors and the judges. Many of her fascinating revelations are gleaned from archives that have only recently been opened up in Russia.
The Americans and the Soviets had cooperated in their fight against Germany. Although it seemed logical to cooperate again when putting war criminals on trial, the process did not go smoothly.
Having suffered the greatest losses in the war, and believing they were primarily responsible for defeating Hitler, the Soviets hoped that a trial covered by newspapers around the world would generate positive publicity both for their people’s suffering and for their soldiers’ valor.
The Soviets had experience with trials, whose purpose was to generate publicity. As Hirsch puts it, “they were accustomed to using trials to shape whatever narratives they wanted.” They were taken aback when their American, British and French partners insisted that accused Nazis had the right to be represented by defense lawyers of their choice, speak freely in their own defense, and call witnesses. These were not part of the infamous show trials that Stalin had orchestrated within Russia in the 1930s, which the Soviets preferred as a model for Nuremberg.
Especially irksome for the Soviets, and perhaps for all the Allies, was that during the trial many defendants offered a tu quoque defense (“you did it, too”), arguing in front of the international press that war crimes had been committed by all combatant countries, and that the only reason that they, the Germans, were on trial was that they had lost the war.
The Soviets even insisted on including in the indictment the slaughter of thousands of Polish military officers and intelligentsia in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. At the trial, they insisted that the Nazis had perpetrated this massacre in 1941 after capturing the area, even though they knew or, at a minimum, the people who were calling the shots in Moscow knew that the Soviets themselves had committed this massacre in 1940 when the Soviet Union was still in control of the area. Over the objection of their Allied partners who knew or suspected the truth, the Soviets constructed a false narrative to try to remove the taint of their own war crime. (Now that the files of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, are open, we know with certainty that the Soviets perpetrated this massacre in 1940.) Hirsch’s research shows how deeply the government in Russia, and even Stalin himself, were involved in day-to-day decisions of the Nuremberg court, both before and during the trial. The Soviet judge on the panel was constantly receiving orders from Moscow about when he could compromise, even during the ostensibly secret deliberations of the panel of judges as they determined the defendants’ guilt and sentencing.
Developments far away from Nuremberg exacerbated the tensions between the Americans and the Soviets at the tribunal. Halfway through the trial, on a visit to the United States, Winston Churchill gave his famous “iron curtain” speech, advocating a strong Anglo-American alliance to protect the free world from the Soviets. The Cold War was underway.
In the end, most people felt that justice was served at the trials. Most of the defendants were convicted – some were executed and others sentenced to long prison terms – and some were exonerated. The Yiddish poet, Avraham Sutzkever, was able to testify to a worldwide audience about the horrors of the Shoah. As Hirsch writes, “he was consumed by both his own suffering and his desire for vengeance, but also strengthened by the knowledge that the Jewish people had survived, heartened by the ‘ardent, intense feeling... that no power of darkness is able to annihilate us.’” Hirsch concludes that Nuremberg is a story “of international cooperation and international rivalry... the real story of Nuremberg is messy – filled with intrigue, back-room negotiation and compromise – and there is actually a great deal of hope in this,” as the trials ultimately provided “a set of ideals toward which states and their citizens can aspire.” I find her optimism surprising. Reading about the self-serving behavior of some of the prosecutors and judges, you could just as easily conclude that international law tribunals are inherently flawed, perhaps creating more problems than they solve. The writer was a professor of Jewish studies for over three decades at York University and is an ordained rabbi.
SOVIET JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG
By Francine Hirsch
Oxford University Press
560 pages; $34.95