‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ Makes the Case for Soviet Influence in the Trials

“The myth of the Nuremberg Moment,” according to historian Francine Hirsch in “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II” (Oxford University Press), is that the trial of the surviving Nazi leadership for war crimes “celebrated the power of American leadership and Western liberal ideals.” But, she insists, “[t]he real story of Nuremberg is messy.”

Significantly, the Allies chose Nuremberg, “the cradle of the Nazi movement,” as the venue where the highest-ranking survivors of Germany’s wartime leadership would be put on trial, starting in November 1945. The courtroom in the Palace of Justice — where, in the words of one Soviet journalist, “the peoples of the world would judge the band of fascist hangmen” — had been demolished and modeled to accommodate the judges, prosecutors, defense counsel, interpreters and journalists who now gathered in Nuremberg. In contrast to the war-ravaged streets of the old medieval town, the air in the courtroom “smelled of fresh wood and paint.”

“[A] popular mythology took hold in the United States that celebrated Nuremberg as the birthplace of postwar human rights,” Hirsch writes. Stalin, however, “envisioned the Nuremberg Trials as [he] had the Moscow Trials of 1936 to 1938,” that is, “as a grand political spectacle whose outcome was certain.” And yet Hirsch also credits the Soviet attorneys who participated in the trials for “mak[ing] their mark on international law in a way that changed it forever.” Even though Hitler and Stalin had secretly agreed to invade and divide up Poland in 1939, it was a Soviet attorney who introduced the idea that “the planning and waging of an unprovoked war of conquest [was] a punishable criminal act,” she argues. “The Nuremberg Trials might not have happened at all had the Soviet view not prevailed.”

Here is the focal point of “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg”: Hirsch argues that the Soviet role has been neglected or even misstated in previous accounts, both in academic scholarship and popular culture. “The myth of the Nuremberg Moment,” as she puts it, misses the point. The trials were not merely “the last hurrah of wartime cooperation” and not even “a sort of Faustian bargain” between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union to punish Germany. Rather, the trials were “an early front of the Cold War” and an encounter between the United States and the Soviet Union at a time “before either state had become a superpower.” As she demonstrates in exacting detail, “Nuremberg was simultaneously about both justice and politics.”

The book is deeply infused with historical irony. In the aftermath of victory, some American and British leaders were in favor of simply shooting the Nazi war criminals; by contrast, the idea of putting them on trial originated in the Soviet Union “during the bleakest days of German occupation,” a time when “victory — or even survival — [was] far from assured.” The man whom Stalin appointed to oversee the Soviet delegation, Andrei Vyshinsky, was notorious for his bloodthirsty role as the chief prosecutor in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, when purely fabricated charges of collaboration with the Nazis provided the basis for the murder of Stalin’s rivals, real and imagined.

 Francine Hirsch argues that the Soviet role has been neglected or even misstated in previous accounts, both in academic scholarship and popular culture.

Many of the individuals whom we encounter in “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg” are obscure men who turned out to play crucial roles in the trials. Foremost among them is Aron Trainin, a Soviet lawyer and law professor (and a protégé of Vyshinsky) who called for “the creation of an international criminal court to try ‘persons violating peace’ ” as early as 1937 and proposed a postwar international tribunal to judge the Nazi leadership in 1944. Only a few years after the Nuremberg trials, as Hirsch carefully notes, Trainin fell afoul of the anti-Semitic purge that Stalin was preparing to carry out in the last days of his life and found himself accused of participation in a “Jewish conspiracy.”

“The irony of this turn of events could not have been lost on Trainin,” Hirsch explains, “who had formulated the Soviet idea of conspiracy during the Moscow Trials in the 1930s and who, along with other Soviet lawyers and writers, had spent the war years emphasizing the Soviet identity of the Jewish victims of the Nazis in order to highlight the solidarity of the Soviet people.”

Hirsch, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, describes how the Soviets negotiated the wording of the Nuremberg indictment to avoid some of the embarrassing facts of history. “Totalitarian” was the adjective used to describe Nazi Germany in an early draft, but the word was removed at Soviet request. The shooting of 11,000 Poles in the Katyn forest was charged against the German defendants even though it was already suspected (and later confirmed) that Stalin, not Hitler, ordered the mass murder. “The Western prosecutors were now complicit in this Soviet lie,” she writes, “even if they did not yet know it.” And the Soviets provided their allies with “a list of taboo topics” that were not to be mentioned in court, including the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. By contrast, the Soviets all but failed to stop Hermann Goering and many of his co-defendants from engaging the services of former Nazi party members to represent them before the tribunal, and the Soviet judges were “flabbergasted by just how much latitude was being given to the defendants.”

Now and then, Hirsch tightens the focus on a memorable moment in the long trial. “The Goering show,” as she describes the testimony of Hitler’s second-in-command, opened when “Goering himself sauntered into the witness box in jackboots and baggy pants.” The judges were vexed that “he intended to use his testimony to reminisce about his glory days.” When the Soviet prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, took his turn at cross-examination, however, the two men “fought with heavy clubs rather than rapiers,” as one of the American prosecutors, Telford Taylor, quipped. When Rudenko, for example, produced evidence of German plans to annex various portions of the Soviet Union, Goering retorted: “As an old hunter, I acted according to the principle of not dividing the bear’s skin before the bear was shot.” Rudenko replied: “Luckily, this did not happen.” And Goering snapped back: “Luckily for you.”

“Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg” is a new look at what we may think of as an old story. What makes it such a compelling and important book, however, is Hirsch’s insistence on filling in the blanks in history and debunking “the myth of the Nuremberg Moment.”

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.