Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II
Francine Hirsch

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT) is among the best studied trials in history. Deliberately conceived as an exercise in public pedagogy, it was intended to be widely publicized and carefully documented. The prosecutors, judges, and, it should be added, the defendants, were well aware that the eyes of the world and of future generations were on them. They took this burden seriously. As Robert H. Jackson, the American chief prosecutor, put it in his opening statement, “the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.” Historians have not disappointed. Many dozens of books in a myriad of languages have documented, analyzed, and, yes, judged the tribunal.

Given this vast, decades-long attention, it is easy to wonder whether there is any need for another Nuremberg book. If that book is Francine Hirsch’s magisterial, magnificent Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg, the answer is yes. This is a beautifully written, deeply researched narrative history of the Soviets’ role in the IMT, which turns out to be a history of the USSR in the world and of their last, faltering attempts at confrontational cooperation with the West.

While the Soviet presence on the prosecution team and on the bench has been impossible to ignore, the tendency in the literature, especially in English, has been to tell the story as an essentially American one. The German-language literature has included a parallel tendency to interpret the trial through the distinctly German lens of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastering the past). Both views have interpreted the Soviet role as marginal, problematic, or sometimes both. What very few scholars have done up to now, and even fewer with the rigor and profound research of Hirsch, is take the Soviets at Nuremberg seriously.¹

“What,” Hirsch asks, “do we get by putting the Soviet Union back into the history of the Nuremberg Trials?” (p. 415). Her answers to this question can be divided into three broad categories. First, we learn a great deal that is new about the IMT itself. Second, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the Soviet Union’s efforts to step onto the international stage as a global power. And finally, we learn that the postwar history of international criminal law and human rights was more complicated, and more influenced by Soviet ideas and practices, than we have previously realized.

In terms of the history of the IMT itself, Hirsch de-centers the America-focused story that has long dominated the literature. To be sure, the Americans were important, but the idea for an international tribunal was as much a Soviet one as an American. Like the Americans, the Soviets saw the purpose of trying major Nazi criminals in pedagogical terms. This was a major reason why Stalin threw his weight behind the idea of an international tribunal, without which any joint Allied tribunal would have been impossible. But there was a major difference between the Soviets and the three major Western allies in how they understood the structure and functions of a didactic trial. During the negotiations over the founding of the Tribunal, Iona Nikitchenko, the Soviets’ intended lead judge, “boldly proclaimed that the major war criminals had ‘already been convicted’ in the Moscow and Yalta declarations and the purpose of the tribunal was, therefore, to demonstrate to the world their guilt and then punish them” (p. 61). In other words, the Soviets envisioned an international version of the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, not anything like an impartial proceeding to determine guilt or innocence.² This divergence engendered a great deal of mutual animosity, and bitter disappointment in Moscow when several defendants were acquitted or received prison terms instead death sentences.

The Soviets saw participation as a way not only to demonstrate the suffering of the Soviet people, the devastation inflicted in the occupied Soviet territories, and the guilt of the Germans, but also to exercise their new role in global leadership. Yet the political and legal culture of the Soviet Union left their prosecutors and judges ill-prepared. Precisely because they were expecting a Soviet-style show trial, the Russians struggled to adapt to the less controlled, more confrontational setting of a Western-style trial. They struggled with even the basics, like finding enough qualified interpreters (German speakers having been viewed with deep suspicion during the Great Purges and the war years). They were not accustomed to having to find, much less verify, evidence. Their preferred method of cross-examination consisted of bluster and bullying. Above all, the Soviets miscalculated when they assumed that nothing embarrassing would come up in open court. They charged the Germans with massacres they themselves had perpetrated in the Katyń Forest, and assumed that the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact with Hitler would go unmentioned. The IMT afforded the defense far more leeway to introduce its own evidence and challenge the prosecutions’ than the Soviets ever anticipated. Consequently—and much to their consternation—both Katyń and the Soviet invasion of Poland underwent considerable scrutiny. As a result, the Soviets emerged from the IMT both wiser and warier of international institutions. They would still exploit them when possible, but realized that doing so risked losing control over the narrative and opened them to international criticism.

That said, Hirsch makes clear that the Soviets made real and lasting contributions to the development of international criminal law and the discourse over human rights. The core notion of crimes against peace, which many scholars have argued lay at the heart of the American view of the Nuremberg case, was initially proposed by Soviet international lawyer Aron Trainin, who also offered an initial critique of the defense of “superior orders,” both of which shaped the London Charter authorizing the IMT. And if the Soviets quickly retreated behind the shield of “national sovereignty” as the Cold War increasingly politicized discourse over human rights in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they nevertheless used their experience at Nuremberg to more effectively engage with, and manipulate, global public opinion.

In the end, Hirsch argues, the story of the Soviets at the IMT confronts us “with all of Nuremberg’s contradictions, and we come face to face with all of the ways international justice is an inherently political process” (p. 416). Hirsch’s nuanced analysis of the Soviets’ efforts to shape—and distort—international justice for their own purposes also reminds us that even dictatorships sometimes end up on the right side of history.

Endnotes